
                         Roanoke Times
                 Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.

DATE: FRIDAY, July 7, 1995                   TAG: 9507070012
SECTION: EDITORIAL                    PAGE: A12   EDITION: METRO 
SOURCE: 
DATELINE:                                 LENGTH: Medium

ONCE A CITY, NOW A TOWN ...

BY THE LATE 1980s, the population - never big - of the Southside Virginia city of South Boston was in decline, the tax base was shrinking, and a turnaround of either trend was effectively foreclosed by the General Assembly's ban on city-initiated annexations. In December 1990, South Boston filed petitions to revert to town status, thereby giving up its independence and rejoining Halifax County.

The county fought the move. After all, Halifax had its tax-base cake and could eat it, too. Industrial development at South Boston's periphery occurred because of the existence of the city and of the provision of city services, mainly sewer and water. But property taxes from development just outside South Boston's limits went exclusively to the county - and would continue to do so as long as South Boston remained a city and could not annex.

In the end, however, the Virginia Supreme Court upheld South Boston's position and the 1988 state legislation under which it was proceeding. Finally, on July 1, the independent city of South Boston became the dependent town of South Boston.

In the long term, this is a victory for both localities and for good government. The old Halifax County and city of South Boston had a combined population of less than 40,000: Operating as wholly separate jurisdictions, one inside the other, made neither administrative nor fiscal sense.

South Boston's reversion to town status is a victory, too, for the state's policy of encouraging the smaller of Virginia's cities to rejoin the counties from which they sprang. This policy isn't spelled out in any one place. But it is evident - as E.H. Monday, at the time a law student and graduate research assistant at the University of Virginia, observed in a recent issue of the News Letter of UVa's Weldon Cooper Center for Public Service - in the legislative record of the past decade.

The concept of swapping independence for annexation rights was a key recommendation of the General Assembly's Commission on Local Government Structures and Relationships, created in 1986 and known also as the Grayson Commission. No bills flowed directly from the commission's recommendations. That, coupled with the fact that South Boston so far is the exception rather than the rule, has led to the impression that the commission's work had no practical impact.

As Monday shows in his article, however, the commission's ideas have had an important influence on state policy. In 1988, the General Assembly established the mechanism by which cities under 50,000 can unilaterally give up independence and revert to town status. For cities that remain cities, the assembly has never failed to renew the 1987 moratorium on annexations, and it presumably will be renewed again before its current expiration date of July 1, 1997. Meanwhile, however, the assembly has continued to allow towns to annex with relative ease.

The reversion law does depart from the commission's recommendations, however, on one point of potentially powerful impact in Western Virginia. The commission's recommended population ceiling for reversion eligibility was not 50,000 but 125,000 - large enough, in other words, to include all Virginia cities west of Richmond, including Roanoke and Lynchburg.

Under current law, neither of those cities could undertake the South Boston path. The option should be made available to both.

by CNB