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.

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.

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.