Item B: River Road/Santa Clara Annexation Policy

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RRCO response to City staff claims for why street annexations are being undertaken Thanks to the intergovernmental agreement of 1987 regarding transfer of land use authority from the County to the City, there is now a checkerboard of City and County jurisdiction in our area. City staff claim that extended street annexations are being undertaken for various reasons-- primarily to improve provision of emergency services, road maintenance, and water and stormwater services to this checkerboard of properties in this area. RRCO finds these arguments neither convincing nor compelling. Emergency Services City staff admit that it is not an issue for computer-aided dispatchers to recognize whether specific addresses are within the City or County and send appropriate emergency personnel. However, they claim it is more difficult to track the jurisdiction of street segments and send "correct" emergency personnel to emergencies in the street right-of-way, or to deal efficiently with incidents that "spill over" from a property to an abutting street (or vice-versa) when the street may be in a different jurisdiction than the property. They say that street annexations will allow the City to provide a "higher level of emergency services from the police and fire departments to incidents occurring in the road rights-of-way" [March 30, 2006 Memo from Jim Carlson to Mayor and Council on Street Annexations]. A memo from emergency services personnel submitted by the City to the Boundary Commission, while asserted to show that extended street annexations would help emergency personnel respond and deliver services to emergencies in road right-of-ways, instead supports the reverse conclusion. First, the memo notes that finding the correct jurisdiction can be challenging, especially in street right- of-ways. But then it offers an example of a situation involving a county address near a county- jurisdiction intersection, and notes that assuming that the County is the correct emergency responder is false because the street segment has been annexed to the City. It seems clear that the annexation of the segment of street in this example, done without annexation of all the properties and intersections along it, is largely what has created the confusion rather than resolved it. Indeed, the memo goes on to state (emphasis ours): "For public safety response concerns (especially police), whether a street segment ROW is annexed or not, doesn't help much unless all the addresses on both sides of the segment and the included intersections are also annexed. Fire/EMS has less of a problem because of mutual aid agreements..." [Memo from Jim Henry, Emergency Services Coordinator, March 26, 2006, in Boundary Commission packet]. Thus, emergency personnel themselves believe that the mutual aid agreements have solved the problems substantially for Fire/EMS services, and annexing extended street segments wouldn't help much with police response since the City is NOT annexing all the properties along the annexed street segments. The idea that extended street annexations will somehow help reduce the number of accidents or incidents that "spill over" from a County jurisdiction property or street to a City-jurisdiction property