Mayor Larry Caddell and Carthage town commissioners have expressed outrage at last Monday’s decision by Moore County to deny the town extraterritorial jurisdiction.

“We have been the redheaded stepchild for the 6½ years I’ve been mayor, and I was hoping that, before I left office, that might change,” Caddell said, “I think that, if you’re going to control your own destiny, that is something the county should approve.

“But that’s their right. They have the power, and they exercised it.”

Carthage officials also complained that an unidentified “concerned citizen” who spoke out against the ETJ request at a hearing on Sept. 18 turned out to be a member of the Moore County Planning Board.

This ETJ request was the first to come before the county commissioners since countywide zoning went into effect. As far as Carthage is concerned, the rules were changed in the middle of the game.

When an advertised public hearing on the question brought a light turnout and no opposition, county planners asked Carthage to do it again, and this time to send letters to everyone in the proposed area of extension.

“All three (Aberdeen, Carthage, and Pinehurst) did it same way,” Town Manager Bob Boyette told The Pilot. “We did it the way they told us to do it. Then in July they apologized for not being specific enough, and said, ‘We intended for you to notify everyone in the ETJ by letter.’”

So Carthage officials again did as they were asked and sent letters to 650 or so property owners. Letters were not sent to other affected people, however, such as people already living inside the town. There was to be a so-called “informational” meeting, and two weeks later a hearing before the county commission.

Carthage officials were surprised by opposition expressed at the informational meeting Sept. 18. The town had received little or no complaint from anyone before.

“We had gotten few phone calls and certainly no opposition,” Boyette said. “People asked questions, but were either neutral or in favor of it.”

Things were different by the time the information session began.

‘Tough Meeting’

“We had a really tough meeting,” Mayor Caddell said. “To be honest with you, I took a pretty good beating Monday night two weeks ago.

“One of the people that kept stirring the pot and beating me pretty bad I thought was a person that lived in the ETJ, and come to find out that it was not. It was Terry Bryant, who actually serves on the county planning board. That’s really what got people going, and I don’t know whether he was a plant, or came on his own. I have no idea.”

Bryant, sitting in the back of the room, spoke and asked questions without identifying himself as a planning board member. He told The Pilot it was because he had gone there “as a concerned citizen.”

“I was not there as a planning board member,” he said. “I was there looking out for my neighbors, that they needed to know what was going on, because Carthage was not telling them much.”

So Bryant addressed the informational session without revealing his connection with the planning board.

“If I had known who he was,” Caddell said. “I could at least have addressed the issue. We thought that the meeting would be handled where they would have to sign up — it was chaos, absolute utter chaos, as Vernon Kelly will attest. People were asking questions that didn’t live in the ETJ.”

Bryant said he thought Carthage had not given people a correct picture of the issues.

“Carthage was not saying there is a possibility that you will be annexed,” he said. “Or ‘We will require you to take water and sewer.’ And they couldn’t give me or anybody else a really good reason why they were asking for that ETJ.”

Caddell told The Pilot that Bryant had made unexpected demands for commitments from the town of Carthage.

“He would come back and want me to make promises,” Caddell said, “… I wouldn’t do that to somebody I didn’t like. If he can sleep with himself doing that…everybody in the building knew who I was, and who Vernon Kelly was, and why we were there. And if those people feel more comfortable, I hope and pray that their justifications are founded.”

Boyette said Carthage did sense some sort of organized opposition, difficult to combat because it appeared to be founded on misunderstanding.

“We got the sense that there was some sort of organized effort,” Boyette said. “People were just afraid and the forum didn’t allow for people to become correctly informed or educated about what would happen.”

Bryant told The Pilot he thought early on that the standard legal advertisement was not enough. He had gone to people in the proposed ETJ extension to speak with them.

“Caddell and Boyette said there wouldn’t be much difference in the zoning, but they also said there would be another public hearing after the commissioners met, if they approved it” Bryant said.

He said he had been at those land use planning meetings a couple of years ago and found the public hearings useless for opponents.

“Once the commissioners decided that it was going to happen, it was a done deal,” Bryant said. “Even though they were having public hearings there wasn’t any way to, to vote it down.”

Bryant says that is why he went to people in the ETJ to tell them to show up at the information session and at the hearing.

“So I just let the folks know,” he said, “if they wanted it, vote for it. If they didn’t want it they were going to have to vote it down before, before it ever passed the commissioners. I didn’t have a strong conviction either way, except I thought everybody needed to know the truth and the whole truth.”

Bryant did not go to the actual hearing in order to preserve his right to a say on the issue at any procedural point that might come before the planning board in the future.

“I didn’t go to the commissioners’ meeting,” he told The Pilot. “If anything comes up about it again, then I won’t have to abstain from my vote. I’m not in the ETJ myself.”

Process Called Unfair

Mayor Caddell views the entire process as having been less than fair to the people of his town.

“I keep hoping and praying that one day we can get fair representation and at least be considered as part of the county” he said. “It doesn’t seem like it’s changed much, does it? And I keep praying that some day they’ll wake up and figure that maybe we just might be somebody.”

Boyette said the mayor is not the only one concerned. “Half of our planning board was there,” he said, “and were quite a bit surprised and disappointed by the outcome as well.”

Boyette said that lot of the opposition seemed based on fear and misinformation, that either many of the statements made at the hearing were completely inaccurate or people had been given incorrect information.

“People were just afraid,” he said. “The forum didn’t allow for people to come correctly informed or educated about what would happen.

“The entire town board is concerned and feel the town had done everything it had been asked to do for 14 months and were turned down because 14 people spoke. Out of 650 or so property owners, only a dozen or so showed up.”

Caddell said Carthage isn’t giving up.