— from Vance County Democratic Party Chair Angie Thornton
Franklin County Commissioner Mark Speed said:
I serve on the Franklin County Board of Commissioners, and I am speaking out today against Section 5 of the conference committee report on Senate Bill 214.
Section 5 would allow Franklin County to acquire property, including through condemnation, in Halifax County, Vance County, and Warren County without the consent or approval of the boards of commissioners in those counties. I cannot support that, even when the authority is being handed to the county I was elected to serve.
Every county in North Carolina is sovereign over the land within its borders. It is the foundation of local government in this state. When the people of Vance County go to the polls and elect a board of commissioners, they are choosing the officials who answer to them for what happens on their land. Those commissioners are accountable to their neighbors at the grocery store, at church, at the ballpark. That accountability is what makes local government work.
Section 5 cuts that accountability out. It could allow officials elected by the people of Franklin County can reach across a county line and take property from a family in Vance County, or Halifax County, or Warren County, and the elected officials of those counties have no seat at the table. The people losing their property would have no one on the condemning board to hold accountable. They could not vote them out. They could not call them. They would have no representation in the decision being made about their own land.
That is not how co-equal local governments operate. That is one county overriding another, with the General Assembly’s permission, and it sets a precedent that every county in this state should be alarmed by. If it can be done to Vance, Halifax, and Warren today, it can be done to any county tomorrow.
G.S. 153A-15 has required the consent of a county’s board of commissioners before another county acquires property within its borders for a reason. It protects citizens. It mandates cooperation. It ensures that when two counties disagree about a project that crosses a boundary, they work it out as equals, through their elected representatives, on the record. Section 5 throws that process out for a shortcut, and the shortcut runs over the rights of citizens in three counties who had no voice in its drafting.
I took an oath to uphold the law and to serve the people of Franklin County. Part of that oath is recognizing that my authority ends where another county’s authority begins. The commissioners of Vance, Halifax, and Warren Counties were elected by their people the same way I was elected by mine. Their judgment about what happens on their soil deserves the same respect as mine does about what happens on Franklin County’s.
I am calling on the conference committee to strike Section 5. I am calling on my fellow commissioners in Franklin County to join me in rejecting a grant of power that should never have been offered. And I am standing with the elected leaders and the citizens of Halifax, Vance, and Warren Counties, because the principle at stake here is bigger than any one project, any one parcel, or any one county.
Local sovereignty is sacred. It is how the people of this state govern themselves. I will not trade it away, even when the trade is being made in my favor.
