Lohr gets the Kaine smackdown too
Brent Finnegan -- March 27th, 2007
Yesterday it was Obenshain, today it’s Matt Lohr’s city annexation moratorium extension bill. Kaine vetoed it. Sounds like RoCo BoS member Bill Kyger isn’t too happy about it, either.
For the record, this bill isn’t really anti-growth. It’s just anti-annexation. It means the city limits stay where they are, but it doesn’t keep growth from spreading into the county. Just today, the DNR ran a story on Preston Lake (aka “H’burg nano 2.0″) in RoCo getting fiber optic cable, stating homes will be available this year.
Once upon a time, when someone from Rockingham County raised the hoary specter of annexation in some overblown dispute or another, Larry Rogers rubbed his pate for emphasis and intoned, “I’ll have hair before anybody in Virginia can annex again.”
That rather baldly sums up the situation. Population of Virginia’s counties in 2000: 4,720,321, up 784,349 from 1990. Population of the cities: 2,358,194, up 113,805 from 1990. Maybe the annexation alarmists are worried about activist judges or something.
People I know often seem shocked to find that there are more people living in the county than the city. According to 7-year-old stats, there were 40,468 in the city, and 67,725 people residing in the county.
The city has grown by at least 2,700 since then, and I assume the county has experienced similar growth. Anyone have those numbers?
There are estimates at the Census and at UVa’s Weldon Cooper center. Worth nothing, however, that both were wrong by a couple of thousand in 1999.
http://www.census.gov/popest/estimates.php