Annexation wars have no winners

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© St. Petersburg Times
published January 24, 2003

LARGO -- The squabbles go on all around us:

Dade City spent $30,000 in a court fight with Pasco County last year to annex a "finger" of land. One county commissioner was agitated enough to declare: "Let's give them the finger."

Pinellas County was caught by surprise and infuriated last November when St. Petersburg reached north to gobble up 700 acres near the Howard Frankland Bridge.

Hillsborough County officials felt ambushed when Tampa decided to annex a 2,280-acre ranch to the city's north. One commissioner said the city had assured her point-blank it had no such intentions.

Pinellas County is waging a political-style campaign versus the cities of Seminole and Largo, using brochures and letters to urge county residents to oppose annexation.

In short, different branches of local government are using our money to wage turf wars with each other. This is stupid and wasteful, but nobody is going to back down unilaterally. The Legislature is supposed to take up annexation this spring. It needs to step in and clear some things up.

"Until we sort out better who's going to provide what service, we're going to have this competition," says David P. Healy, executive director of the Pinellas Planning Council. "We're going to have this overlap, and we're going to have some uneconomic duplication."

While Pasco, Hillsborough and other counties have their share of city-county tension, nobody out-annexes Pinellas, which has 24 cities. At times county officials have felt like a chunk of cheese being gnawed by mice from the inside out.

"In this day and age, it's incredible that the cities and county are arguing over territory," says Largo Mayor Bob Jackson, "and not looking at which services are best provided at each level."

That's a natural thing for Jackson to say: Largo has been one of the more active annexers. Speaking for many city-types, Jackson says that unincorporated residents get the benefits of living near city-funded amenities. The cities subsidize them, he says -- a claim at which the county snorts.

Jackson says there are some things cities do better than counties. Cities should provide truly "municipal" services and counties should emphasize countywide, overarching roles such as courts.

Sounds good. And if we were living in Green Acres, with the friendly county agent dropping by the farm now and then, there could be a more clear division of labor. The trouble is that unincorporated urban areas (like a lot of unincorporated Pinellas, and much of suburban Tampa) still have city-style needs. The county is their "city" by default.

Pinellas' county administrator, Steve Spratt, has led the County Commission to raise a separate tax on unincorporated residents to provide exactly those kinds of "municipal" services, such as recreation. Each resident who agrees to be annexed no longer has to pay that separate tax to the county -- which is why the county fights.

"We're glad you're a part of Unincorporated Pinellas," says a cheerful sales brochure prepared by the county for targeted residents. Inside, there's a listing of benefits of living in the county, and a chart comparing the tax burdens of city and county -- naturally, with the county coming out better.

Besides a more clear division of city and county roles, the Legislature needs to revisit Florida's creaky annexation standards. The old model -- based largely on the mutual consent of the annexer and the annexed -- leads cities into haphazard, ad-hoc expansion, instead of well-thought-out policy.

"It's no surprise that our municipal boundaries are not in any coherent pattern," says the planning council's Healy. "It's a jigsaw, a sawtooth pattern that happens as the property owners find it in their interest."

Human nature, as well as the nature of bureaucracy, is to protect turf. But the taxpayers are less interested in financing tugs-of-war between egos. What matters most is that fires are put out, not whose logo is on the fire truck.

Knowing the late longtime mayor of Largo, Thom Feaster, did not keep me from calling him "Tom" on Wednesday. My apology.

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