Petitions to “de-annex” properties from the city of Eatonton under a new state law appear to be headed into the nitty-gritty details of a “deep weeds” stage.
The first patch of weeds surfaced a couple of weeks ago when County Manager Paul Van Haute and the petitioners’ main proponent, Tom Thompson, asked Putnam County commissioners for a break in any further action until mapping “anomalies” could be investigated.
The commissioners had used aerial photos with boundary overlays from the website of qPublic.net in their review of two petitions involving a maximum of 10 properties each.
Thompson argued the city limits in the 1991 annexation could be off by 200, 300, or even 400 feet, and that the tax assessors’ maps should be used, instead.
“There could be some ambiguities that we are checking, out of an abundance of caution,” said Van Haute in a telephone interview earlier this week. “There are a number of parcels that could create ‘islands’. We just want to make sure it’s right.”
Any de-annexation that creates “islands” – parts of a municipality with no connection or pathway for city services – is clearly prohibited in the new law. A side effect is that any de-annexation of a group of properties may be considered together, but must ultimately have a 50-foot connection to the city’s outer limits.
In other words, de-annexation must start from the outside inward.
The Middle Georgia Regional Commission in Macon was engaged to double-check the set-up of Eatonton’s city limits and has reported back. Van Haute said it was possible that a couple of small parcels in the two petitions may have to be withdrawn because they might raise the issue of creating an island.
Meanwhile, a third set of petitions has reached the county commission’s offices, but they will not be considered by the commission until staff has completed its review of the first two sets, Van Haute said.
This third petition mostly involves farmland properties along Lower Harmony Road and a couple of small parcels on Oconee Springs Road.
An additional note on the intricacies of mapping came from the county’s chief tax appraiser, Chuck Anglin. The qPublic maps come from data in the tax assessors’ office, he said.
While the maps in his office serve well for tax purposes, they may not be best suited for boundary disputes, he added. The assessors’ maps started as aerial photographs printed on paper and were later converted digitally. The problem with aerial photographs lies in the topography of the ground below.
“The curvature of the earth can skew (photographs) around the edges some. That’s just the nature of aerial photographs,” Anglin explained. “People come in here with boundary disputes, and I tell them they would be better off hiring a surveyor.”
Another potential weed patch lies in what the new law does – and does not – address. It does offer municipalities three broad principles for denying the petitions – “safety, health and welfare” – which raises the issue of defining “welfare,” especially if the implications of a denial translate into higher property taxes or cuts in services for remaining city dwellers.
In the current situation involving two sets of 10 properties, Eatonton’s lost tax revenues would not exactly be crippling. According to City Administrator Gary Sanders, the 20 properties accounted for a little over $16,000 in city taxes last year, while their acreage easily totaled 1,000.
Virtually all the properties in question are working farms eligible for a 10-year lock-in of appraised values under a “conservation use” exemption.
However, the new law carries neither mandates nor deadlines for a city to address the petitions in the first place. Unless there are other laws or case law precedents on the topic, such an omission raises the question of a city simply not dealing with the petitions, possibly for years.
All in all, it takes little imagination to foresee directional signs coming to city hall and the county administration building: the line for lawyers is to the left; for surveyors and all others, to the right.