IncorporateSevenLakes.com will not be presenting the North Carolina General Assembly with a petition this month aimed at making Seven Lakes a town.
"We have no plans to submit a petition," Randy Merritt told The Times. Merritt, one of three Seven Lakes business owners who spearheaded the incorporation effort, added "It's effectively dead, as far as we are concerned.”
Merritt, Darrell Marks, and Vann Joyce introduced the idea of incorporating Seven Lakes and McLendon Hills — while keeping the communities' gates intact — in March, touching off a months-long community-wide debate about whether — and how — Seven Lakes could become a town.
The group rapidly attracted several hundred signatories to their incorporation petition, but, in the long run, fell short of the minimum 596 signatures needed to present their proposal to the General Assembly's Joint Legislative Commission on Municipal Incorporations.
Moore County Elections Director Glenda Clendenin told The Times that IncorporateSevenLakes.com had presented 522 signatures, of which 459 were found to be those of registered voters residing in the area that would be incorporated.
Merritt told The Times that he had learned that Moore County's state legislators — Representative Jamie Boles and Senator Harris Blake — wanted to see much more than the minimum fifteen percent support before getting behind any incorporation effort. The support of local legislators is critical to the success of any incorporation effort, UNC School of Government incorporation expert Kara Millonzi told several Seven Lakes groups earlier this year, because the local legislators draft and introduce the enabling legislation that actually creates the town.
Competing proposals muddied the water
After IncorporateSevenLakes.com introduced their petition for incorporation with the gates — which would have created a modest municipal government with a five cent tax rate and tax increases limited by the town charter — a second vision for an incorporated Seven Lakes was introduced by the Seven Lakes Study Group. The latter group advocated dropping the gates in order to create a much larger, better-funded municipal government that would take over responsibility for maintenance of the roads within the now ungated communities.
Merritt told The Times that this second proposal doomed the IncorporateSevenLakes.com plan.
"We felt like, when the Study Group went public, we were dead," Merritt said, "because we would never recover from the confusion their proposal created in the mind of the public."
"We kept getting feedback that 'We don't want to take our gates down.' We kept trying to clarify, but the message got so muddied that it became impossible for us to gain the further support that would be needed."
The Study Group laid out a budget and proposed services for the Town of Seven Lakes, but did not offer a concrete incorporation petition that residents could sign and support. Instead, they proposed a two-year educational period in which the idea of incorporation could be thoroughly discussed in the community.
Though their original idea was to ask the League of Women Voters to sponsor a series of small group meetings, that idea apparently fell by the wayside as the Seven Lakes West Landowners Association launched its own internal study of incorporation. The Study Group endorsed that process and encouraged the other landowners associations to follow suit.
Regarding the West Side's study, Merritt said, "What has frustrated us is that bodies like the Westside Board and their committees have felt the need to respond to both proposals even though we were the only group organized with a real petition."
"The Study Group just floated an idea — an idea that was very unpopular. But everything you read references both groups, and we have been confused with them."
Still a good idea?
"We're disappointed that the public didn't see the benefits of incorporation beyond the fact that we would get some of the downtown streets repaired," Merritt said. "And we could do that without using local taxes."
"The public didn't see the benefit of gaining local zoning control, or gaining a real municipal voice with the county," he added.
"As a result, we lost the ability to someday have an ABC store. We lost the ability to, as a municipality, explore ways to better our town by possibly getting sewer at some time. We lost the ability to apply for grants that could have paid for projects to better the community . . . and we lost the ability to create our own municipal police force."
"We lost all this that we could have had at not a real expensive price," Merritt continued, noting the tax rate proposed would have amounted to $250 per year for the owner of a $500,000 home.
"In the end, we failed to get more people like ourselves involved that were fervent about the need for incorporation," he said. "Three people just couldn't do it."
More study ahead?
The Westside Board has published four subcommittee reports on incorporation so far, out of seven originally proposed. All four are available on The Times website at www.sevenlakestimes.net
