That’s been happening in Houston for a long time. I don’t actually live in Houston but we all say we’re from Houston. We do live in Harris County. As a side note, part of the Houston City Limits is in Ft. Bend County to the south. I don’t know how that happened.
In Texas we have what’s called Municiple Utility Districts that are taxing entities. Developers sell bonds to pay for a water treatment plant and the home owner pays a monthly bill PLUS taxes until the bonds are paid off. That usually takes a few decades. So, if you live outside the city limits you more than likely pay MUD taxes. (People who move here from out of state freak out when they learn they have “MUD” water.) The up side to living in a MUD is the city is NOT going to annex you until those bonds are paid off.
A few years ago Houston annexed an area NE of the city called Kingwood. The MUD bonds had been paid off. The people tried to fight it but if a city wants to annex an area so they can collect taxes there’s nothing that can be done to stop it.
They say a hundred thousand people are moving to Houston every year. Very few actually move to Houston. They’re moving to the surrounding suburbs.
Thanks; very interesting set up for infrastructure in the Houston area. To avoid annexation from Norfolk and Portsmouth, VA, residents in the surrounding counties petitioned the state for their counties to become cities which could not be annexed. If you look at a map of SE Virginia, most of the cities have very large land areas, a result of earlier annexation threats.
Texas law gives each substantial city an "extraterrestrial jurisdiction" or ETJ, which is an unconstitutional convenience for the billionaires who own the State government, to play games with city boundaries for their own personal gain.
Houston has a dictatorial-mayor form of government. If you are on City Council, your area's "capital improvements" are hostage to the mayor's pleasure (this is how Annise Parker got her nasty GLBT bill through Council -- just as predecessor Kathryn Whitmire got a similar bill through for her Montrose Catamite power-bloc, only to get the **** slapped out of her when a councilman with a pair of stones stood up to her and demanded a vote of the public, the whole public, and nothing but the public). Kathy lost that referendum 5:1, which is a measure of her gall.
The people who were annexed by decree in Kingwood suffered a lugubrious fall in police protection; formerly they'd been policed by the county sheriff and their County Constable's deputies, but after the annexation police response times blew up, as the City tried to extend their beat cops to cover a large area 10-15 miles up the road.
More jokes on you department: The local black Council member b*tched about having a bunch of white people dumped in his district and demanded they be "districted out". For the benefit of FReepers not living in the old Confederate States, it must be explained that this is not a laughing matter: The Federal Department of Just Us frowns on white voters being added to black sinecure political seats (it's called "diluting minority participation", and it basically means **** You White M************s.) So, posthaste, maps were drawn and redrawn, and His Black Omnipotence was appeased, and the Tax Play Victims in Kingwood were assigned to a City Council District 20 miles away in one of the most stupid-looking gerrymanders in American history.