Decatur Homeowners Ask to Have Adjacent Parcel Annexed
Decatur Metro | December 19, 2011The property owners at 416 Eastland Drive live on a great invisible fissure of bureaucracy.
One parcel of their property falls within the boundaries of a city with a junkie’s obsession on the “walkable”, pushes its school system to be the best in the northern hemisphere and has weekly trash pickup. The other side of their property sits in a unincorporated county that can’t keep its police officers happy, is recovering from a major Superintendent scandal, and has trash pickup twice a week.
Who wouldn’t want resolution? Taxes inside of Decatur are confusing enough! (Not to mention the thrice weekly trash pickup.)
The other, more important reason the owners of 416 Eastland are looking for Decatur to annex the DeKalb parcel is for clarity regarding access to the school system. According to a letter to City Manager Peggy Merriss (page 15 of meeting materials PDF), Meisha and Vance Shofner say that they were originally told by the school system that their daughter could attend CSD. But more recent maps on the school’s website no longer include 416 Eastland inside the CSD school zone. The residents want full annexation so that school jurisdiction is totally clear.
DeKalb has raised no objection to the single parcel, .43 acre annexation.
The Decatur City Commission meets tonight to take up the issue as well as confirm the 2012 schedule for meeting.
Latest from Decaturish
I’ve never understood how this can happen that part of a property is in one jurisdiction and part is in the other. There should be some universally understood rule like the rounding up/down rule in math. Something like “If part of one’s property is in county/city/state/school zone that begins with the letters A-J, etc……then it belongs in the county that begins with the earlier letter in the alphabet….” Hope these homeowners luck out and end up in CSD. Wonder what the real estate agent told them.
The line is the line and there are definitely some spots where it seems to have been drawn by someone with no concept of the individual parcel boundaries at ground level. I wonder who’s been providing these folks services (trash and whatnot). Probably DeKalb, since that’s the portion where the house is.
Either way, this will pass. An easy way for the city to make up for past bureaucratic laziness.
Many of the city/county lines were drawn long before these areas were subdivided. That area of Eastland was a large pasture in 1940 and the City line followed a fence line through the pasture. Made sense at the time.
Thanks, Mises. So the sloppiness was a result of whoever prepared the plat later on?
I wouldn’t call it sloppiness. The history of the city limits would be an interesting research project. If you look at the northern most city line, except for the piece that goes over to North Decatur Rd, it parallels an east-west land lot line. It was probably a property line of a farm at the time. When the north side was developed, the planners had pretty much abandoned the grid, unlike the south and west side of Oakhurst. It would have been too restrictive on the land planners to make every lot conform to the city line. Likewise, It would have been a nightmare to adjust the city limits to trace every property that didn’t fall on the city line.
http://www.decaturga.com/Modules/ShowDocument.aspx?documentid=486
Definitely an interesting research project. But I am especially interested in the part that goes up to N. Decatur Road.
The lines actually *cross* N. Decatur and take in the houses facing the road on the north side of the street (about 10), but the city limits don’t end at the lot line of those properties. Our house, built in 1951, is on the north side of Decatur and is completely within the CoD, but the city limit line actually takes in a small portion of the lot *behind* us, but not all of it or even a large portion. The homeowner there pays a percentage of her property taxes to the City of Decatur.
It seems clear that portions of what was the same development are both inside and outside the city limits. When we first moved in, I assumed that a portion of the homeowners at some point requested annexation. How else to explain that weird handle at the top of the city limits? But if that were the case, why would parts of lots also be annexed? It doesn’t appear to follow any discernible line.
On my list of New Year’s resolutions this year is researching the history of our house, so I hope to learn how this happened, but if anyone out there knows more, I’d love to hear.
The same situation exists with our property, hence my alias… we have 10 by 10 sq feet of our yard in Decatur, the rest in unincorporated DeKalb. When the property was sold to us we were told that we would be zoned for COD schools. Not an issue for us since we don’t have kids. However our neighbors who were told the same and have a very slightly larger chunk inside were denied access. I think they resolved it by fully annexing in. It is my understanding that if any of your property is inside or adjacent to the city line, you can petition for incorporation at any time. Anyone know this for sure?
Yes, if you can ask at anytime to be annexed if your property is adjacent.
That’s interesting. Does that mean, then, that you will automatically be annexed if you are adjacent and request it, or would it require commission approval? When we were house shopping we were scared off a few homes that were adjacent (including one on Willow that had a portion of its lot inside the CoD). The person I spoke to at the tax office (I know, not exactly going to the best source of information) told us that we would not be eligible for city schools since the house itself was outside the city limits, but that we could appeal.
Kind of wish I had known that we could ask to be annexed if we were adjacent. I hope some area Realtors are paying attention because, naturally, the schools were the key selling point for us.
The commission definitely needs to approve all annexations, both large and small.
Realtors should certainly know about this, especially those who live and/or work inside the city limits, but I’m sure most of them don’t treat it as a done deal. Up until a couple years ago, the commission’s policy regarding this small annexations has been – come one, come all. But ever since the 2008-09 attempt at large scale annexation, there are some folks in the community who have valid concerns about any more residential annexation when it comes to the school system. The unofficial and real reason why that annexation push never matriculated in a vote was because no one could agree on or explain how the city would support an even larger # of students. This concern has now trickled down into these small parcel annexations, and if the city commission were to continue to add new parcels of R-60 onto the city’s tax digest, those concerns would bubble up very quickly.
There may be ways for the city to still move forward in a larger scale annexation, but the only way they’ll convince themselves – and the population – that it will work will be if a very large % of it is commercial. No one that I’ve heard from has figured out how to do that though.
Right. I had heard that the city’s current stance was no piecemeal annexations, which I interpreted to mean, no individual houses, only parts of larger adjacent sections of the county where it would make sense and the majority of homeowners were in favor. I wasn’t optimistic about the majority of homeowners in any particular area being enthusiastic, especially after all the back-and-forth that went on when the last plan was proposed.