‘It’s barely enough time’: Idaho cities worry about impact of Senate annexation bill
Three dueling bills were heard, in the Senate local Government and Taxation Committee, that attempted to simplify, narrow and change Idaho law around how cities can annex properties into their limits.
In the end, only one bill prevailed.
Sen. Todd Lakey, R-Nampa, sponsored a bill that would redefine a city’s area of impact and restructure the process cities take to set their areas of impact. The cities of Nampa and Kuna and the Idaho Association of Counties supported Lakey’s bill over the others. And that bill garnered the support of the committee.
Areas of impact are legally defined areas where a city anticipates growing and extending services. Cities can establish areas of impact through negotiations with their county. Current law says as long as the county agrees, cities can extend their areas of impact as far as they desire. Lakey’s bill would change that.
Debate about city areas of impact in the Idaho Legislature began last session, when Rep. Doug Okuniewicz, R-Hayden, sponsored a bill that aimed to change the ways cities can annex properties into their city limits. That bill would have placed the decision in the hands of property owners instead of cities.
Okuniewicz said the bill idea came from him observing North Idaho cities Hayden, Rathrum, Post Falls and Coeur d’Alene fight over annexations. But at the same time, Star and Middleton were fighting in court over which city gets to annex certain properties between them. The lawsuit was eventually settled. I
The bill, that will be amended then sent to the Senate floor for a vote, would change the following aspects of current law:
- When a city wants to establish an area of impact, its county must have a public hearing. County commissioners must make a decision based on new criteria: topography, where the city’s anticipated growth lies, and where city sewer and water are already extended.
- A city’s area of impact can extend only 1 mile past city limits.
- The area of impacts must be reviewed in public hearings every five years.
- City areas of impact cannot ovelap by other cities except in the following circumstances: if after five years a city has not renewed its area of impact; if one city consents to the crossing; and if a property owner in the unrenewed area wants to be annexed into a different city, and that city consents.
“This effort really balances interests,” Lakey said during the hearing. “You have the interest of cities who’ve made investments in infrastructure, sewer, water roads, in their impact area. You have landowners that may have extended sewer lines. But as a landowner, you also want to make sure that city areas of impact do not extend out too far, such that it’s more of an effort of control instead of an area where services are really to be provided in the very near future.”
Lakey said he had multiple meetings with a group of mayors, a county commissioner, legislators from the House and Senate, Idaho realtors, the Idaho Building Contractors Association and the Idaho Association of Counties.
Joe Stear, Kuna mayor, testified in favor of the bill, saying he appreciated the collaboration.
“The city of Kuna and Meridian had some issues with area of impact boundaries,” he said. “We were able to repair that because we got along and we appreciated each other’s ideas and comments. I know it doesn’t always happen that way.”
Stear said Lakey’s bill helps bring clarity to cities with overlapping or abutting areas of impact.
What other cities had to say
Meridian did not take a position on any of the annexation bills but city staff members and Mayor Robert Simison plan to monitor it through the amending order.
In a phone interview, Simison said current annexation and areas of impact laws are not compatible, but as long as cities have good relationships with each other, “no matter what the lines on the paper say, it’s about your staffs working together.”
The one-mile boundary and five-year timeline in Lakey’s bill may be hard on fast-growing cities, Simison said.
“Sometimes a mile is enough,” Simison said. “Sometimes it’s not. Every city is unique. Every land issue is unique, and one mile may be adequate for some cities, and it may be wholly inadequate for others.”
City of Boise staff members agreed. Kathy Griesmeyer, government affairs director, said the city had concerns about the one-mile area of impact reduction and the timeline to implement the new law if it was to go into effect.
In the hearing, Lakey said he would amend the timeline for cities to comply. His new proposed timeline would push compliance to the beginning of 2025.
Jessica Szelag, Boise’s deputy planning director, said the city hasn’t had many issues with competing areas of impact or annexations. Boise’s city limits abut Eagle’s and Meridian’s, but Szelag said the negotiations often simply require “a conversation” and “logical decision making.”
“The way that the current state code works is it allows cities to negotiate their area of impact as development opportunities and growth happen, not draw a line that’s arbitrarily one mile out,” Szelag said by phone. “It assumed that planning is so perfectly on the mark of a mile or two. If you were to look at almost any city’s boundaries, it’s really jagged, and it tends to follow property lines. You can’t just perfectly draw circle around the city and say that that’s the area of impact.”
The city of Boise wasn’t looking for any change in Idaho’s annexation or area of impact law this legislative session, Griesmeyer said by phone.
Five years is “barely” enough time for Meridian
Simison said he grew up in Inkom, a small city near Pocatello, where the city’s boundaries haven’t grown much in his lifetime. But in Meridian, it takes a average of five years to grow a mile, he said.
“It may barely be enough time,” he said. “You go through the process, you create (the area of impact), and then you’re gonna immediately start doing the process again because the timelines are so short.”
The city is working to extend a sewer line to serve south Meridian residents, Simison said. For a sewer or water project like that, it often takes 25 years to work with the state on water issues.
“Having an area of city impact planning area that’s one mile out that has that short time frame of five years, it doesn’t align with the project you’re doing,” Simison said.
Simison would like to see the area of impact statute have more teeth, so cities don’t risk extending services to an area that could shortly be part of a different city.
“If you can have a current property owner who says they want to be in the city today and then they sell that piece of property,” he said, “and the new owner says ‘no, I want to go to a different city,’ if you are putting in that sewer line and they go in a different city, you’re potentially costing all the ratepayers who’ve been paying into that.”
Griesmeyer suggested that Lakey’s bill is premature.
“We recognize that there’s been a lot of growth and development in the state since the land use laws were last updated,” she said. “So perhaps there’s an opportunity here to seek a interim legislative committee where we can have a broader group of stakeholders.”
Two other competing bills
Two bills competed with Lakey’s bill. One was from Okuniewicz, who brought back his bill from last session.
He argued that Lakey’s bill did not address the needs of a property owner who wants to be annexed into a specific city, but who may lie in another city’s area of impact.
“Mine is laser focused on a small issue,” Okuniewicz said.
Lakey, who was in favor of Okuniewicz’s bill last session in committee, said he “felt like that there was an opportunity to get more people around the table and find a broader solution.”
Okuniewicz asked the committee to send his bill along with Lakey’s, but the committee did not.
Rep. Julianne Young, R- Blackfoot, and Sen. Julie VanOrden, R-Pingree, sponsored a bill they said would simplify and reformat parts of Idaho code that some land use attorneys and planners have criticized.
But Young’s bill faced opposition from the Association of Idaho Cities and the city of Post Falls. Kelley Packer, executive director of the association, said Young worked with them on the bill, but in the end they could not agree to support it.
“We never did agree to a wholesale change and replace and reformat,” she said. “We just couldn’t get there, because there was too much left out.”
This story was originally published March 7, 2023 at 10:03 AM.
