ORIENTATION FOR NEW CITY AND COUNTY MANAGERS
Annexation and Incorporation
State law regulates municipal annexation and incorporation. See the following from the School of Government’s publication, County and Municipal Government in North Carolina.
Article 2: Incorporation, Abolition and Annexation
North Carolina’s annexation laws are a central part of the state’s policies for providing government services in urban areas, policies that favor the expansion of existing cities over other ways of providing those services. Only cities are authorized by law to provide the full range of basic urban services: water supply and distribution, sewage collection and treatment, law enforcement, fire protection, solid waste collection and disposal, and street maintenance and improvement. Counties are not authorized to provide street maintenance and improvement, and no types of special districts are authorized to provide either law enforcement or street maintenance and improvement. Furthermore, as is noted in the discussion on incorporation, the law favors expansion of existing cities over incorporation of new ones. Not only does the state constitution restrict the General Assembly’s ability to incorporate new cities in the proximity of existing ones, but the state’s annexation statutes facilitate the orderly expansion of the state’s cities.
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