No WhiteWash!

The citizens of the Rock Springs Road area have expressed their displeasure by not responding to the letter sent to them by the City of Kingsport, Tennessee.  Kingsport, Tennessee had sent out 218 letters to Sullivan County residents in areas 7 and 8 stating that they would be given a choice to be annexed and they had ninety days to make their minds up.  Out of the 218 letters, only ten residents wanted to be annexed and one of the ten was from an area to be annexed in 2010.

The city continues to put their spin on annexations.  In the quote from February below, City Manager John Campbell states that is a lot of interest in people wanting to be on a sewer line and now John Campbell is saying that a reason for the lack of response to the letter is because residents don’t want to make their neighbors mad.

“One thing we’ve learned is we’ve had to be able to adjust at a particular time. What wasn’t anticipated was we would have an attorney in Knoxville suing everyone in the state over annexation, whether he knew anything about the annexation or not,” Campbell said. “We’ve got some areas that probably have some people who would like to be in. There’s a lot of interest in some people wanting to be on the sewer line, and because of what we’ve done, it’s developed a lot of interest from developers.

“There are other ones out there who are interested. Part of what they run into are, while they want to be annexed, they don’t want to make their neighbor mad,” Campbell said. “Certainly we would have liked to have seen more, but at the same time there are some other people still looking at it.”

Let’s get real Kingsport.  The lack of response from county residents to your letter is that they simply do not want to be annexed.  It should be very clear to the Kingsport elected officials that their future on the BMA may end when the next election occurs.  If forced annexations continues, it would not take many voters to vote against the current BMA members.  See post City of Kingsport, TN Elections.