More than two dozen area residents converged on Burlington’s city hall this week as the city’s elected leaders held a series of public hearings about the proposed annexation of various city-owned parcels.
Burlington’s city council ultimately conducted these hearings on Tuesday as a prelude to the absorption of land that the city already owns in both Guilford and Alamance counties.
Among the territory that the council agreed to annex that evening were the grounds of Burlington’s Guilford Mackintosh Park and Marina as well as the city-owned Valley Golf Course. The council also voted to expand the city’s existing limits to include a sewer pump station near the University Commons shopping center and the right-of-way for a municipal water line that runs to the west of the Mackintosh on the Lake residential development.
In each of these cases, city staff members had proposed these annexations to consolidate Burlington’s control over property and right-of-way that it had previously acquired outside its territorial limits. Yet, the potential annexation of these parcels – which have, in some cases, belonged to the city for decades – elicited a combination of wariness and confusion from residents in the surrounding countryside.
Between 25 and 30 of these befuddled neighbors ultimately turned out for Tuesday’s obligatory public hearings about the four annexation proposals. In order to ease the minds of these individuals, Jamie Lawson, the city’s planning director, emphasized that the city’s relatively narrow intent in bringing this land into its municipal borders.
“These are all city-owned parcels that are contiguous to the existing city limits,” she declared by way of introducing the annexation proposals. “These are city-initiated annexations because they’re city-owned parcels…and I would also like to add that the annexation requests do not affect any other property that are adjacent or near the area.”
Lawson’s assurances were enough to forestall any objections to the pump station’s absorption, which the planning director said would close up a “doughnut hole” within the city’s jurisdiction. The other three items, however, took a little more coaxing to assuage the neighbors.
The proposed annexation of the right-of-way for the aforementioned water line met some resistance from Wanda Small, who observed that this same strip of real estate could also be used in the future to develop a new access road for Mackintosh on the Lake.
“We are just opposing this,” she added. “This is connected to what used to be a family farm…and that [right-of-way] would come directly through the middle of the farm.”
The city’s proposed annexation of Guilford Mackintosh Park and Marina also raised the eyebrows of some nearby property owners – two of whom approached the podium to get more information about the city’s intentions.
But perhaps most perplexing from the audience’s perspective was the proposed annexation of the Valley Golf Course, which the city had owned and operated for more than five decades without bringing the property into its limits.
This golf course, which was known as “Indian Valley” until 2021, had originally been the cynosure of a private residential development that sprung up on Burlington’s northern frontier in the early ‘70s. Although the city acquired the links in 1975, the surrounding homes have remained in the hands of private residents – many of whom were in attendance when the golf course’s annexation came before the council on Tuesday.
Tracy Pitts, whose home lies on perimeter of the city-owned golf course, seemed to speak for much of the neighborhood when she questioned the city’s motives for annexing the property after five decades of ownership.
“I don’t understand what is the purpose of this,” she conceded. “Why is this actually being done now?”
The city’s intentions were equally obscure to Ron Walker, who owns several residences within the golf course’s orbit. Walker went on to press the city’s leaders for some explanation of the proposed annexation.
In response, David Huffman, Burlington’s city attorney, observed that this move will bring the golf course into the service areas of the city’s own police and fire departments. Alan Balog, the city’s chief of police, added that this shift in jurisdiction will have an enormous symbolic import for his own agency.
“We take a certain amount of pride for taking care of the things that we’re responsible for,” Balog elaborated. “This is an important component of us being able to do that…but rest assured, there is no crime problem out on the golf course.”
These assurances seemed to have the intended effect on Walker, who acknowledged the wisdom of having city personnel attend to city-owned property.
“We do have county sheriff riding through,” he declared. “But it will be a comfort to know that we’ll have the police [taking over the beat].”
The council, for its part, was not the least bit reluctant to extend its sphere of responsibility to include the golf course as well as the other three sites that were up for annexation on Tuesday.
“These are pieces of property where the city has been maintaining the property and making investments for many years,” councilman Ian Baltutis said as he captured the prevailing mood of the council, “and I think it looks a little weird when they’re not actually in the city.”
The council went on to approve each of the four annexations by a margin of 5-to-0.
