By Randy Kugler
The Manzanita Council conversations surrounding the annexation Ordinance of 17 acres in the Highlands has become a farce.
The Emergency clause in the original Ordinance prepared by staff apparently wasn’t proofread before being submitted to the Council. The Council apparently also never read the Ordinance and approved it in a first reading in June.
After I pointed out the error and asked for an explanation, Councilor Hart responded by crediting the unknown staff who presumably wrote the Emergency clause in the first place with now somehow discovering and notifying the Council of their error.
Since the Ordinance states that the Council finds that passage is “in the best interests of the City ” I asked Councilor Hart for an explanation of what those best interests were. He couldn’t name any but the Council would explain those benefits at the July meeting.
I suggested a commonly used method by cities to allow the developer to proceed with his approved development plans through a delayed annexation strategy that paused annexing the property into the City until such time it was in the City’s best financial interests to do so.
The discussions between the City and developer on this annexation started early this year. The City spends hundreds of thousands of dollars annually for a City Manager, planning consultants and legal advice. With these considerable resources, negotiating an annexation with financial terms that were indeed in the “best interests of the City” was possible but unfortunately never happened.
At the July meeting the City’s planning consultant explained that a financial impact analysis was not required and a consultant would be necessary to determine if a delayed annexation strategy would produce a better long term financial outcome for the City. The consultant concluded by stating that the annexation would be very helpful to the City in terms of immediate additional property tax income but could provide no numbers to back up this claim. Annexations of residential property as the Council has just approved rarely results in a positive financial impact for a city. No consultant is necessary to confirm this conclusion. The fact that none of the aforementioned highly paid City staff could forecast potential property tax revenue based on the City’s low property tax rate and explain this simple fact to the Council is troubling.
Generally speaking, each new house built will pay less than $200 a year into the General Fund in property taxes. With City Hall currently only open 4 days a week so staff can keep up with their existing workload, the added service demand costs for City Hall and Police services by new City residents in this subdivision who will be expecting access to all City services are not going to be offset by the insignificant property taxes generated by this development.
Next was a Council reminder of the critical shortage of housing for long term renters, working families and area service workers that housing resulting from this annexation was addressing. Adding more upscale homes in the Highlands is of course the solution to meet the needs of these folks who have effectively been priced out of the existing Manzanita housing market.
Not surprisingly was what the Council didn’t mention as a benefit of immediately annexing 70 more single family building sites. With approximately 17 short term rental applicants waiting for a license, the Council needs every new house it can issue a permit for inside the City to relieve the pressure on this growing backlog. The further irony is that these new STRs won’t be built in this newly annexed subdivision. The Highlands will simply serve as the plantation producing new STRs that will crop up in existing neighborhoods in Manzanita.
Expect the Council to tell us that they had no options in this annexation decision. Had the Council truly been interested in the best interests of the City, those early negotiations with the developer would have resulted in approval to build homes without the need for annexation at this time. In exchange, the City would determine when annexation would occur.
The Council is now engaged in hand wringing, wanting citizens to believe that they are powerless and can only sit on the sidelines as these issues come before the City and then present nonsense reasons after the fact for their decisions. There is nothing preventing the Council from asking the developer to withdraw his annexation application allowing the City to do a reset on this mess but that timeline is closing quickly.
Perhaps the Council should have staff amend the Ordinance one more time to accurately confirm what they could not say at the meeting. “Adding more short term rentals is in the best interests of the City”. Residents should be sure to thank the Council for looking out for our best interests.
