The effort to incorporate a new city of St. George from unincorporated parts of East Baton Rouge Parish has brought to light some of the serious problems with the state’s statutes dealing with both annexation and incorporation, according to Ken Murchison, a professor at LSU’s Paul M. Hebert Law Center.
Speaking Tuesday at the Louisiana Smart Growth Summit, Murchison said the state law concerning incorporation is premised on an outdated view of incorporation.
“Today’s incorporations are unlikely to involve a handful of people in a rural area who want to form a municipality to get services,” he said. “Instead, they are likely to form a defensive incorporation to avoid being tied to an existing municipality.”
Also problematic, Murchison said, is that the incorporation statute gives the organizers of a proposed incorporation a lot of discretion to decide how the proposed municipality will be organized and does not require them to list or write down the proposed organizational structure.
Similarly, Murchison believes the state statute dealing with annexation is unduly lengthy, confusing and outdated, having been amended numerous times since it was created more than 40 years ago.
“I defy anyone to read and make sense of it,” he quipped. “The only good thing I can say about it is that it was good for a law professor teaching local government.”
Among the problems with the annexation law are that it is ambiguous, contains limited and questionable protection for property owners, does not coordinate with the incorporation statute and has no consideration of the broader interests of the community.
Attorney Charles Landry, who moderated Tuesday’s panel discussion, pointed out that the statute used on numerous occasions in recent months by the City of Baton Rouge to annex properties was a city-parish law, not the outmoded state statute.
“The city-parish plan of government has a simple, straightforward annexation process that has been used by the city,” says Landry. “It trumps the state law.” —Stephanie Riegel
