In some states, cities need to be contiguous, so they will often annex a narrow strip of land out to another bigger section that they have annexed. Santa Barbara annexed a narrow strip under the Pacific Ocean so that they could annex their airport. Chicago also has a pretty narrow strip connecting it to O'Hare. I have no idea whether Ohio requires that as well but I don't know any examples of Ohio cities that have have non-contiguous parts.

 

LA has this same thing, only with the port down near Long Beach. There's a thin strip of city owned land extending from near Downtown all the way down to the harbor, cutting through many smaller municipalities along the way.

I can't find the explanation, but I believe the Dayton situation is because of a combination of a special exemption for the Dayton airport (it was land owned by Dayton but not annexed because its discontiguous, similar to Cincinnati and the Blue Ash airport) along with something in Montgomery County's ordinances about incorporating or dissolving townships.

 

Dayton's airport was in Butler Township but was annexed in/became an exclave of the City of Dayton.  I don't believe the Blue Ash Airport was ever actually in the City of Cincinnati, correct?  I thought they just owned it (much like that railroad track through Kentucky).

Correct. Maybe the City of Cincinnati should've tried to create a charter city called Cincinnati, Kentucky that was just a narrow strip of land with a railroad on it.  :?

Longest city ever!

^On the other hand, some of the townships play the game from the other side of the table. Green Township is trying to buy a chain of parks along the border with Cincinnati in order to prevent annexation.

 

Cincinnati hasn't annexed anything significant since the 1940's.

 

Curious, which chain of parks are you referencing here?

Delhi Township seems more likely. They actually have a lot of parks bordering Cincinnati.

^I think Bicentennial Park in Green Township, bordering Mt. Airy Forest, is the only one actually purchased, but one of the former township trustees announced the strategy of buying a chain of parks along the border.

^yes that one is off Diehl/Shepherd Creek and buts up against Mt. Airy forest. If you look on google maps there is quite the "green crescent" to the north and west of the urban core. I think it's great and would like to see as much as possible of it preserved.

From Aaron Renn:

 

http://www.cincinnati.com/story/news/politics/2017/09/12/study-elmwood-place-and-norwood-should-merge-cincinnati/654855001/

The actual report can be found here

 

https://www.manhattan-institute.org/html/mergers-may-rescue-declining-suburbs-10611.html

 

lol at Indian Hill annexing into the city.

 

Elmwood Place is the only one I expect to happen in the next 10 years. Norwood residents often seem to hate the city and pride themselves on their independence. They would never support it.

I just don't see why Cincinnati would want to annex Elmwood. Is their any upside other than maybe annexing the businesses south of Township avenue? Seems more likely to have them fold into Springfield TWP or whatever it would be there. The only area that really would make sense to me for Cincinnati is the Columbia TWP part between Oakley and PR. https://www.google.com/maps/@39.1712881,-84.4181312,16z?hl=en

 

Norwood, Amberely, St Bernard, Silverton and others will never vote to join the city. Golf Manor maybe since it's also part of CPS. I've also always wondered how Ridgewood survived not being annexed by Amberely or Cincinnati. https://www.google.com/maps/@39.1893313,-84.4327023,17z?hl=en

Isn't Cheviot part of Cincinnati Public Schools too?

Elmwood Place actually has an attractive business district. With a little TLC and some outside investment, it could be a stable neighborhood of the city. The businesses south of Township wouldn't hurt either. It would put very little additional strain on the city's resources and add some nice housing stock to the city.

Isn't Cheviot part of Cincinnati Public Schools too?

 

From the CPS website.... The Cincinnati Public School District covers an area of 91 square miles including all of the City of Cincinnati, Amberley Village, Cheviot and Golf Manor; most of the City of Silverton; parts of Fairfax and Wyoming; and small parts of Anderson, Columbia, Delhi, Green, Springfield and Sycamore townships.

What's kind of amazing about Elmwood Place is how ambiguous the border is between it and Carthage/Hartwell.  I guess there is a street where one side is Elmwood and the opposite is Carthage, but I couldn't tell you which one.  If I were to guess, despite having basically the exact same sort of homes, that houses sell for slightly more in Carthage. 

a friend of mine had a house up in hartwell. it's kind of a quirky area. is that an actual neighborhood in cinci or a burb?

a friend of mine had a house up in hartwell. it's kind of a quirky area. is that an actual neighborhood in cinci or a burb?

 

Neighborhood

Houses in that area are unbelievably cheap.  Everything up there is still selling at 2010 prices. 

yeah i was going to say that. it's a very nice neighborhood with well-kept, substantially solid craftsman housing.

Hartwell is a well kept secret, IMO. It's right next to Wyoming, where houses of a similar quality and size sell for 5X as much just a few blocks away. I think schools are the primary factor, there. Wyoming is typically one of the best districts in the state, whereas Hartwell is Cincinnati Public Schools, one of the worst, so it doesn't attract many families.

Kind of funny, in the Columbus area annexation is a matter of standard practice, in the Cleveland/Akron/Canton area it's a filthy word that's highly effective at sabotaging even the most benign regionalization discussions.  I would suppose in Cincinnati it's somewhere in the middle.

The Cagis site gives a nice detailed look at the boundries.

 

http://cagisonline.hamilton-co.org/cagisonline/index.html

Kind of funny, in the Columbus area annexation is a matter of standard practice, in the Cleveland/Akron/Canton area it's a filthy word that's highly effective at sabotaging even the most benign regionalization discussions.  I would suppose in Cincinnati it's somewhere in the middle.

 

It's been a long time since Columbus has annexed another municipality though. I think the last time that happened was the annexation of Hanford Village in 1955. It was loccated between Driving Park and Bexley.

Isn't Cheviot part of Cincinnati Public Schools too?

 

From the CPS website.... The Cincinnati Public School District covers an area of 91 square miles including all of the City of Cincinnati, Amberley Village, Cheviot and Golf Manor; most of the City of Silverton; parts of Fairfax and Wyoming; and small parts of Anderson, Columbia, Delhi, Green, Springfield and Sycamore townships.

 

Hmm.. I bet the part of Sycamore that is CPS is the weird leftover piece just south of Cross County Hwy (around Chaucer Drive)

The more I hear about this the less convinced I am it's a good idea.  The article talks about how Cincinnati should take the high road and be the regional leader by taking on these struggling municipalities.  As if central cities haven't suffered enough.  If you want to make that argument, then St. Bernard should be on the docket too, but since it has a decent tax base due to the Ivorydale factories it's left out of the conversation.  Talk about a double standard. 

 

Since they're independent, we can see clearly that these entities are not solvent.  The reasons behind that are varied, but annexing them won't fix it.  The supposed efficiency of combining services and "eliminating waste" looks to me to be nothing more than a fantasy.  Eliminating a couple of offices and redundant employee positions is only going to save enough money to pave a street for a couple blocks.  Maintaining the built infrastructure (streets, pipes, curbs, lighting) is killing a lot of these towns and nobody realizes it.  Annexing places like this doesn't make the problem go away, it just hides it.  If we were to de-annex most of the city's neighborhoods, we'd find that downtown, OTR, and maybe parts of Uptown are about the only places carrying their own weight, and then by a very large margin (downtown alone yields 25% of the city's property taxes but doesn't consume even a tiny fraction of that amount of infrastructure or services). 

Well the fact that this study was done by a 'conservative think tank' makes me skeptical that what it is proposing is intended to be positive for the city of Cincinnati, or any center cities in similar positions. Cities taking on more debt while counties and states leverage more control is in conservatives best interest.

Conservative doesn't necessarily mean anti-city. People like Aaron Renn (author of this report) and Chuck Marohn of Strong Towns have been making the case for many years about how growing our cities is more fiscally responsible than encouraging endless sprawl like we have been doing for decades.

Conservative doesn't necessarily mean anti-city. People like Aaron Renn (author of this report) and Chuck Marohn of Strong Towns have been making the case for many years about how growing our cities is more fiscally responsible than encouraging endless sprawl like we have been doing for decades.

 

Yes but they also fall into the usual trap of "I don't know what the solution is, but it's not this" that many pundits seem to like.  Chuck especially is very allergic to the idea of solutions at all, preferring the term "rational responses."  Ok, what rational responses then?  Even that seems to be hard to tease out of him.  Strong Towns has really started going off the deep end of "hurr durr big gubmint bad" in a very off-putting and tired rhetorical kind of way. 

Yeah I don't read many Strong Towns articles anymore but I definitely don't agree with them 100% of the time. As a conservative-focused group, they are almost exclusively going to advocate for investments that have a positive ROI. I think it's important to keep that in mind, but IMO that should not be the be-all, end-all factor for every single decision a city makes. So, bringing it back to the topic at hand, there may be some areas that Cincinnati could/should annex that would not necessarily increase the city's ROI but would be good for other reasons...for example, increasing our city's population might give us more clout in certain contexts.

...for example, increasing our city's population might give us more clout in certain contexts.

 

That's about the only benefit I can come up with.  The thing is, Norwood is the only potential to really boost the numbers by any meaningful extent, and even then it's barely 20,000.  Any of these other places are just rounding errors unless you really get aggressive in assembling a lot of them together at once. 

Annexing Norwood would surely make the matter of building a light rail network a lot easier.  Otherwise, COAST, et al., can get Norwood to block progress through charter amendments and other nonsense. 

I thought I remember that one of the motivations of repealing the estate tax was to coerce some of the non-viable or barely viable communities in the city to merge. The benefit was that it would help streamline muni taxes because there would be fewer different reporting districts and make Ohio a better place to conduct business.

I figured I'd break away this discussion from the Gerrymandering thread so that there'd be a place to discuss the quirks, benefits, and shortcomings of how Ohio's various forms of local governments are laid out, as well as a place for discussing the functions of these different governmental units and how they interact with one another. I've been trying to figure out townships for a while, and I'll start by carrying over a few thoughts from the other thread:

 

I was actually doing a thought experiment re: townships the other day with a friend. Are their any practical benefits to monster townships like West Chester remaining unincorporated beyond the township taxation structure? Not that it would ever get signed into law and there's probably all sorts of other legal issues with this idea, but would there be any good reason to force incorporation of a township if it reaches a certain population or population density?

 

The reason suburban Ohioans like to live in townships is because townships can't have an income tax like cities can. I think this is absurd. Once you have a certain level of population, the local government needs to provide basic services to them, and should incorporate as a city, or be annexed by an adjacent city.

 

Michigan takes it a step further in the wrong direction. They allow townships to incorporate as a "charter township" which prevents them from being annexed by nearby cities.

 

Continuing on and paraphrasing myself, when townships have essentially developed into fully-fledged cities and/or have beneficial population or commercial resources, what's stopping other nearby cities from annexing them? Wouldn't Hamilton want parts of West Chester and Liberty Township, or are the legal/other barriers too high to start grabbing up that land?

 

 

I think one thing that stops it is having to annex land that they don't want in order to get land they do want. Since the areas have to be contiguous the city may not want vampiritic land. That's why Columbus and even Cincinnati have so many snaggletoothed boundaries with townships.

It sounds to me like cities can’t directly initiate the process; property owners in the township have to do that. But you can do it on a parcel by parcel basis, as long as they are contiguous with the city/village they are attempting to join.

 

https://www.ohiobar.org/forpublic/resources/lawyoucanuse/pages/lawyoucanuse-463.aspx

On the subject of contiguous land, how come the Dayton Airport is allowed to be a part of the City of Dayton even though there is no connection via land? I can't think of any other part of Ohio where this kind of exclave exists.

^Because Dayton invented airplanes so we're just allowed to annex anything aviation related  ;)

 

More seriously, I've wondered this as well. Riverside and Trotwood, both Dayton suburbs, also have weird exclaves completely surrounded by Dayton, but I think that's just a result of the entire township (including all the random "islands" surrounded by Dayton) deciding to incorporate. Which, admittedly, is still weird, and it's also a little weird that it didn't happen to any other townships-turned-cities in Ohio, as far as I'm aware. It would be like the remaining parts of Columbia Township deciding to incorporate despite being made up of 8 small chunks of land scattered around eastern Hamilton County. As far as for the Dayton Airport land, I have yet to see a good explanation for how they managed to pull that off.

Cincinnati owned the Blue Ash airport site until recently. Don't know if that means that land was part of the City of Cincinnati, or if it was still the City of Blue Ash, just with the land owner being Cincinnati?

Cincinnati owned the Blue Ash airport site until recently. Don't know if that means that land was part of the City of Cincinnati, or if it was still the City of Blue Ash, just with the land owner being Cincinnati?

 

It just means the city owned it.  Just like how Cincinnati owns a strip of land over 200 miles long from Ludlow, KY south to Chattanooga. 

 

Cincinnati owned the Blue Ash airport site until recently. Don't know if that means that land was part of the City of Cincinnati, or if it was still the City of Blue Ash, just with the land owner being Cincinnati?

 

It just means the city owned it.  Just like how Cincinnati owns a strip of land over 200 miles long from Ludlow, KY south to Chattanooga.

 

Rail right of way?

Cincinnati owned the Blue Ash airport site until recently. Don't know if that means that land was part of the City of Cincinnati, or if it was still the City of Blue Ash, just with the land owner being Cincinnati?

 

It just means the city owned it.  Just like how Cincinnati owns a strip of land over 200 miles long from Ludlow, KY south to Chattanooga.

 

Rail right of way?

 

Yep. It's an interesting tidbit.

Cincinnati owned the Blue Ash airport site until recently. Don't know if that means that land was part of the City of Cincinnati, or if it was still the City of Blue Ash, just with the land owner being Cincinnati?

 

It just means the city owned it.  Just like how Cincinnati owns a strip of land over 200 miles long from Ludlow, KY south to Chattanooga.

 

But this is different than City of Dayton's situation with their airport?

Apparently there is a specific loophole regarding municipally owned airports “...that the airport was annexed utilizing a special annexation procedure only available to certain international airports provided for in Ohio Revised Code Section 709.19.”

 

http://www.englewoodindependent.com/top-stories/4811/union-opposes-dayton-annexation

It looks like Dayton lost that annexation case too. Interesting loophole, for sure. I wonder if Hopkins was a similar situation before the land swap with Brook Park to make the airport contiguous with the city of Cleveland or if it was always just located in Brook Park.

I think one thing that stops it is having to annex land that they don't want in order to get land they do want. Since the areas have to be contiguous the city may not want vampiritic land. That's why Columbus and even Cincinnati have so many snaggletoothed boundaries with townships.

 

What's interesting to me is that Columbus played hardball and, as I understand it, said you're not going to get access to our water unless you agree to be annexed. Whereas Cincinnati was happy to sell water from Cincinnati Water Works to surrounding municipalities and unincorporated areas. And many cities in Southwest Ohio are happy to enter into JEDDs with neighboring townships rather than go the annexation route.

https://www.cleveland.com/cityhall/index.ssf/2018/06/cleveland_mayor_frank_jackson_61.html

 

A proposed state law would require Cleveland to charge outer suburbs the same water rates as the city, regardless of delivery cost.  An extremely pro-sprawl bill with a suburban Columbus sponsor.

Ridiculous.

I think one thing that stops it is having to annex land that they don't want in order to get land they do want. Since the areas have to be contiguous the city may not want vampiritic land. That's why Columbus and even Cincinnati have so many snaggletoothed boundaries with townships.

 

What's interesting to me is that Columbus played hardball and, as I understand it, said you're not going to get access to our water unless you agree to be annexed. Whereas Cincinnati was happy to sell water from Cincinnati Water Works to surrounding municipalities and unincorporated areas. And many cities in Southwest Ohio are happy to enter into JEDDs with neighboring townships rather than go the annexation route.

 

There weren't any JEDDs when Columbus was really hot 'n heavy with annexation though. Job poaching wasn't much of a thing since there weren't any good jobs in suburbs at the time. Columbus, Ashville and South Bloomfield have a JEDD for Rickenbacker. Columbus cannot annex any land in the JEDD until 2059.

https://www.cleveland.com/cityhall/index.ssf/2018/06/cleveland_mayor_frank_jackson_61.html

 

A proposed state law would require Cleveland to charge outer suburbs the same water rates as the city, regardless of delivery cost.  An extremely pro-sprawl bill with a suburban Columbus sponsor.

 

I thought these people understand economics.  This isn't just pro sprawl, they are trying to bankrupt Cleveland water.  Maybe Cleveland should tell outer lying communities to pound salt and get their own water.