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On Tuesday, voters in five separate areas bordering the city of Seminole will vote on whether to be annexed. Each area will decide its own fate. But taken as a whole, the election marks one of the more significant local political events of the year in Pinellas County.
The annexation would be the biggest ever for Seminole and one of the biggest ever in the county. Seminole seeks to increase its land area by half again, to add maybe 10,000 people to its current population of 18,600, and to increase its tax base by 40 percent.
If all five areas agree to be annexed, Seminole will leapfrog Tarpon Springs to become the sixth-most populous of Pinellas' 24 municipalities, behind St. Petersburg, Clearwater, Largo, Pinellas Park and Dunedin.
The flip side of the coin is the potential effect on Pinellas County's 25th "city" - by which I mean, the county government itself.
Because Pinellas is totally urbanized, the county government out in the unincorporated areas provides some of the same basic services that a city would.
Residents in these unincorporated areas pay an extra tax to the county for those "municipal" services. When they are annexed into a city, they stop paying the extra tax to the county, and switch to paying the city tax instead.
But as Pinellas' 24 municipalities reach out and absorb the more desirable areas on their borders, the unincorporated county is left with fewer and fewer taxpayers.
In general, the county says it is losing more tax dollars from annexations than it is saving by serving fewer residents. This can't go on indefinitely.
So Tuesday's election is being closely watched by all sides, and is quite controversial, as has been chronicled by our reporter Maureen Byrne Ahern. A group of residents of the affected areas has organized to oppose annexation. It is called Unincorporated Seminole, or USEM.
So resistant are these good citizens that they balked at filing their campaign reports with the city clerk instead of the county - after all, who is the city, to reach out beyond its limits and dictate to them? On their list of contributors, they placed quote marks around the word "Seminole" in any mailing address that fell outside the city limits.
The city of Seminole and the county government each have endeavored to "educate" the voters in the affected areas. Both have prepared brochures and sales pitches. (Another interested party, the giant garbage company BFI, supplied 500 signs to the anti-annexation campaign. The company does not like to lose customers when they get annexed, see.)
"We're glad you're part of unincorporated Pinellas!" chirps the county's colorful brochure. It talks about customer service, parks and recreation, emergency services, libraries, water and tax rates that unincorporated residents get. Seminole's brochure is more direct: It outright urges the residents to vote yes.
The numbers are not clear-cut. It seems difficult to make a flat-out, dollars-and-cents conclusion that one way is absolutely cheaper than the other for every resident.
The city of Seminole taxes its property owners at a rate of 2.9396 mills, which means $2.94 for each $1,000 worth of taxable value. The county's millage for its unincorporated municipal services is 5.191 mills.
But that's only the beginning of the calculation. In the city, there are both a 6 percent tax and a 6 percent fee on electric and gas bills. There are different garbage-collection fees. Flood insurance can have a different cost, too.
On top of that, there are considerations of quality of government service, even quality of life. Lastly, and maybe the deciding factor in the election, there's the intangible, but entirely real psychological issue of being a city resident vs. living "out in the county."
Sometimes it seems that Pinellas County is a big chunk of cheese with 24 mice burrowing at it from the inside. Largo has been the most aggressive annexer over the years, and right now Largo and Seminole are waging a legal challenge against the county over what guidelines exist. Meanwhile, St. Petersburg under Mayor Rick Baker is showing new northward ambitions.
We are backing into the future of the county by default, one nibble at a time.