If Signal Mountain is successful in its efforts to annex Windtree and Fox Run subdivisions, opponents of the measure vowed Monday evening, town council members will face recall.
"If the courts rule against us and we are brought in kicking and screaming, then just know you're going to see us again," Austin Seay warned the officials during a public hearing on the proposed annexation of the two subdivisions.
Further, he admonished Councilman Bill Lusk - who narrated the presentation outlining reasons the town believes the annexation is a good idea - not to make plans for an extended political future.
"Don't get too set on being mayor someday," he advised.
Town officials believe the annexation makes financial and political sense, and is the right thing to do.
Signal Mountain residents are picking up more than their share of the cost of the new high school and other services, Councilman Lusk noted during his presentation, while those in expensive neighborhoods in the unincorporated areas on the mountain are getting a free ride.
That's why it's only fair the Windtree and Fox Run subdivisions be annexed and development there be incorporated into the town's growth plan, he contended.
Thirty-five cents per hundred of Signal Mountain's property tax revenues go to pay the debt on the new high school on the mountain, he noted.
That's your own fault, annexation opponents responded.
"You voted for that tax on yourselves to support the high school," Fox Run resident Duffy Griffin said. "We didn't have anything to say about it."
Mr. Griffin said he's already got all the government in his life that he can stand.
"When you go to the airport you have to take off your shoes," he said. "When you go to the courthouse you have to take off your belt and empty your pockets . . . I've had enough."
A handful of town residents were on hand to support the annexation, but they were vastly outnumbered by opponents.
Fox Run resident John Roden Jr. said his property taxes will go up 60 percent if Signal Mountain annexes the subdivision.
And to add insult to injury, he noted, "there's not a single service provided by the town that I want . . . I don't want a street light shining in my window . . . People in unincorporated areas are there because they want to be."
It is infuriating, Brent Morris told town council members, to be treated as if "we are too ignorant and ill-informed to make our own decisions."
"We reject taxation without representation and you clearly do not represent us," he said, noting that even the town's mayor has acknowledged that residents of the two subdivisions overwhelmingly oppose the annexation.