Say Anything Blog

Tomorrow at the North Dakota state legislature there will be a hearing on the extraterritorial zoning issue at 9:00am.

For the uninitiated, extraterritorial zoning is the practice where cities expand their regulatory authority to areas bordering the city limits.  This is done in the name of planning, but it has really gotten out of hand.  Cities are burdening property owners who have no representation in city government with fees and regulations while simultaneously robbing the counties and townships outside of the cities of revenue generated by things like building permits.  And the planning excuse seems a little absurd once you realize that, given current municipal growth rates, some of the areas currently being zoned by the cities wouldn’t be reached by those cities for another century or so.

Here’s a video production from the North Dakota Policy Council explaining the issue:

It’s not a good situation, and it’s a practice that needs to be ended.

There is a bill in the state senate that would require the cities and counties/townships to form committee to address planning and regulation of these areas, but I think that solution needlessly complicates what should be a simple issue.  As far as I’m concerned, a piece of property is either within the regulatory zone of a municipality (inside city limits) or it’s part of a township or country (as the case may be).  Thrusting the property owners in these disputed areas into a gray area where they’re being regulated both by the counties/townships and the cities (where, again, they have no political representation) is hardly a good solution.

Anyone interested in this issue should attend the hearing mentioned above.  Or, in lieu of attending, should contact their legislators and let them know about the issue.