Given the legal
parameters as currently exist, organizers opted
to turn in the petition, on which there was no time limit to gather
signatures, earlier than they had anticipated, the main problem being that
nobody really knows what the law has to say definitively on the matter. During
the roughly year-long collection effort, Baton Rouge-based interests not
wanting the formation of a competitor city next to it annexed parcels of land
designed to make a new entity less financially viable, so the actual number of
signatures needed – one quarter of the area anticipated to be incorporated – is
unknown because the boundaries kept changing, the eligible signatures kept
changing, and the amount of them needed kept changing. Even though organizers wanted
20,000, well over the presumed target in the neighborhood of 17,750 (although
it may
be closer to 16,500), they turned them only a few hundred above that
number, cognizant that time was working against them in terms of signatures
remaining eligible (some who signed may have moved away or annexed out in the
interim) and in legal motions Baton Rouge interests were making that try to
invalidate the whole operation.
The entire episode pointed out
shortcomings in the existing law regarding the creation of new cities and
adding to those already in place – a timeline where petitioners could choose
when to submit on the basis of estimated success in getting valid signatures
and at the ballot box (through this in essence being able to choose when on the
election calendar the item appears) and cities being able to subvert the
process through defensive annexations that creates confusion and potentially
thwarting electoral processes – and thus begs for statutory clarification. That
does not mean an unwise
embargo on all of these efforts, as attempted in one effort that fizzled
last session, but by a reconceptualization of the process that brings order and
fairness effective at the beginning of the state’s next fiscal year.
With more specification in mind, instead
of an open-ended operation, the process should begin with organizers submitting
an intention to the secretary of state that outlines the intended area of
incorporation. At that time, the parish registrar of voters where the proposed
incorporation is to take place would be notified and would be given 30 days to
produce an exact list of registered voters living in that planned constituency.
Then organizers would be given up to nine months to collect signatures, although
they could take less time. Whenever (or if) the petition gets turned in, the
registrar then would have 30 days to confirm whether the signer was registered
validly at the time the signature was obtained, and if the number were short,
organizers then would have 30 more days to collect enough to reach the standard
of one-quarter of registered voters, provided that a signatory at a specific
address where there were previous signatories also had those previous signers
maintain valid registration at that location. Depending upon the number, the
Secretary would instruct the deadline for parsing of the newly-obtained
signatures to the registrar, and if enough had been obtained, then the registrar
would report back to the Secretary by that deadline who would schedule the election
at the next available local or state general election in that jurisdiction,
even if that were almost a year in the future.
An important change to annexation
law would have to be made in conjunction with these in order for the process to
work fairly: as soon as intention to submit a petition was filed, until the
process played out completely, none of the area specified in the petition could
be annexed by any other municipality, in order to prevent entities interfering
with the process outside of their borders. However, to stop the process from
being used not to incorporate but instead to fend off annexation, the law also
would specify that an unsuccessful incorporation attempt would disallow any
subsequent incorporation attempt using any of the area in the previous attempt
for one year after the date of failure (voluntarily withdrawal, failure to turn
in anything by the due date, failure to get enough validated signatures, or electoral
defeat). Thus, the subverted use of the process could hold up annexation at
most for about two years.
One suggested change, that there be
some kind of “impartial pre-election review” of a request, would cause more
trouble than it’s worth, because of the simple fact that there is no such
thing. Politics always will bring partiality to whatever kind of review occurs,
where what is considered a “reasonable” attempt, if that is specified as a
criterion, will be held hostage to whatever are the political prejudices of the
panel members charged with making that kind of decision. Far better would be to
allow the democratic process to play out to determine the merit of the proposal,
through the necessity of gathering enough signatures, and then if successfully
whether the electoral marketplace supplies enough votes for it to pass.
The chaos of seeing through the
current process, illustrated by the unprecedented legal gymnastics that Baton
Rouge interests have undertaken, can be reduced dramatically with these
changes. The Legislature would act as a derelict if it did not address this
reform in its upcoming 2015 regular session.
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