Excerpt from Annexation Study, Mount Airy, North Carolina

Annexation, it has been said, is the process of extending the city limits to the limits of the city. Prior to the advent of the automobile, it was common for cities to include within their corpor ate boundaries the bulk of related urban development. Limited means of transportation encouraged a rather compact development pattern. The automobile changed all of this by encouraging development to string out along the arteries leading out of town. In time, some of the space between the developments which fronted on these arteries was also converted to urban use. The resulting pattern is one of extreme scatteration. Cities have been reluctant to extend urban type services, such as water and sewer, to these spottily-developed areas. They have been even more reluctant to annex them.

With the foregoing historical hindsight as a background, let us ask the question Why should a city wish to annex territory? The main reason is that cities and towns are set up especially to provide urban - type services to densely built - up areas. This is why cities and towns were incorporated in the first place. This is why they must grow. Typical of the services which densely built-up areas must have are public water and sewerage systems, frequent garbage collection and street cleaning, superior fire and police protection, street lights and, in some places, sidewalks. Rural and semi - rural areas can get along without such elaborate facilities. The public health, safety and welfare are not ordinarily impaired, for instance9 by septic tanks located on half - acre lots. However, many of the fringe areas of Mt. Airy contain residential areas where the density of housing is higher than it is in parts of the Town. The whole question of where urban-type or rural - type facilities and services are appropriate depends on population density. In other wordsp the more people that are crowded together within a small space the more opportunities there are for friction of one sort or another. There are also more opportunities for epidemics, fires and other hazards to transpire. Whereas cities are designed to prevent these problems (and to supply other services to which town-dwellers have become accustomed), counties provide services which are essentially county wide in their application.

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