Rio Communities debates annexation

January 23, 2009

The Rio Communities Association debated ways to improve the area’s quality of life on Tuesday night, with Commissioner Ron Gentry and Valley Improvement Association head Bob Davey as guest speakers.

Rio Communities residents have been concerned with a lack of police protection, a dwindling business community, inadequate sewerage and water, and slow road improvements.

Davey laid out three possibilities for Rio Communities: 1) remain with Valencia County and request special districting to allow limited self-governance and more economic flexibility; 2) incorporate, which means Rio Communities would form its own municipality; or 3) advocate annexation into the City of Belen.

He explained that staying with the county means Rio Communities will continue to need road improvements, prod the county to provide better protection from the Sheriff’s Department, and not have economic development support, among other things.

“The county is never going to change,” Davey said. “It can’t do, constitutionally, more than it’s doing now.”

He also questioned the ability of Rio Communities to incorporate.

“Anytime we’ve gone to election on incorporation, we’ve lost and we’ve lost heavily,” Davey said of two to three previous attempts to incorporate Rio Communties. He added, “We don’t have the kind of commercial base today that we had 10 years ago,” noting that municipalities live or die on gross receipts.

Gentry concurred about the potential failure of incorporation.

“We’ve seen our economic base, our commericial base, deteriorate,” Gentry said.

Davey provided a detailed analysis of how to get the City of Belen to annex Rio Communities. He said the City of Belen has argued in past conversations that it would never “grab” Rio Communities, but would annex only if the businesses and residents of Rio Communities wanted to be a part of Belen.

“They will not make the first move,” he said.

Davey recommended strip annexing, where small portions of an area are gradually annexed into Belen. The areas that would want annexation would have to petition the City of Belen to initiate the process.

Taxes would increase in the low hundred of dollars, he estimated. He said he wasn’t sure the City of Belen would even go along with strip annexing, though the city government had considered annexing Rio Communities commerical area along Highway 47.

One local resident, Bill Brown, expressed concern that the strip annexation of the businesses in Rio Communities would “forever split Rio Communities into three,” an eastern area, a western area and the City of Belen cutting through the center.

Brown said River Road was strip annexed with little benefit to the residents north and south of River Road. He also didn’t see much benefit to Rio Communities’ economic development efforts if annexed into Belen, saying, “If you want to see business deprivation, look at Belen. It’s all boarded up.”

He suggested Peralta as a model for incorporation, because they, too, have a limited gross receipts tax base.

Posted in: Archive