Bethel Township residents, Huber Heights Council discuss proposed 296-acre annexation

HUBER HEIGHTS—A small group of Bethel Township residents attended the regularly scheduled Huber Heights City Council meeting on Monday, June 24. They spoke to council members and shared their objections to a proposed 296-acre annexation.

“We’ve heard about traffic issues, we’ve heard about school issues and your solutions,” Bethel Township resident Jeff Morford said. “Please realize your solutions would not be needed if you had not created the problem in the first place.”

“I ask you not to continue the problematic annexations,” he continued. “Let your neighbors in Bethel Township grow and develop at a pace that is correct for Bethel Township.”

“I’m not against all annexations, as long as both communities have the right and privilege to be part of the process,” Morford said. “I do not see our citizens or trustees having a voice or having a vote.”

Township residents have voiced concerns over a petition seeking an Expedited Type II annexation of approximately 296 acres of property currently located in Bethel Township to the city of Huber Heights. The petition was filed on January 16 by a small group of property owners in the proposed annexation area, which is located near the current Carriage Trails development.

The Bethel Township Trustees voted unanimously to approve a resolution against the annexation petition, although their approval is not needed in order for the annexation to proceed, according to current state laws.

The annexation petition’s fate will be decided by a vote of the Huber Heights City Council. The city held a town hall meeting seeking input during their Monday, June 10 meeting; a vote on the annexation petition has not yet been scheduled.

A growing number of Bethel Township residents have been attending and speaking at Huber Heights City Council meetings for several months; a large crowd attended the town hall meeting, which lasted over three hours.

Tempers flared several times during the city council’s Monday, June 24 meeting.

“Right now, you guys voting ‘no’ is our only hope,” Bethel Township Trustee President Julie Reese said. “We have no say, and no choices.”

“There’s more information that we’re asking for, that we’re going to obtain, and then we’ll make the decision when we have all the information,” Huber Heights Mayor Jeff Gore said.

“You don’t know what my thoughts are personally about this,” he said. “You may think you do; I’m sure a lot of people think they know what I think about this.”

“We’ve been compared to violating civil rights of people on several different occasions, and we’ve all sat up here and taken it,” Gore said, responding to residents’ comments. “To say that we don’t care is very offensive.”

“I do understand the situation that Bethel is in, and I understand that none of you want this,” he said. “The way to convince many of our residents not to be interested in annexation is for Bethel Township residents to stop making it sound like Bethel is Heaven, and Huber Heights is Hell.”

“We do care, and that’s why we’re here,” Gore said. “That’s why we’re having this discussion, and that’s why this went on for two years, to make sure that we have all the information that we need.”

“Money is a key part to this,” he said. “It takes money to operate a city, it costs money to provide services for people.”

“Without us reaching an agreement to formally detach them, they become essentially dual-citizens,” Bethel Township Trustee Beth van Haaren said. “They vote in Bethel Township elections, they vote in Huber Heights elections; they could run for trustee, they could run for city council.”

“They would also pay any non-service levies that we have,” she said.

“The residents of the Bethel School District 100 percent paid for the high school that opened in 2017,” Reese said. “Now our residents, and your residents in our school district, have a thirty-year mortgage on that building.”

“The new high school was at capacity when it opened,” she said. “While some money was being saved for construction, it cut into other spending and staff salaries; dollars were stretched to the breaking point in order to save in the construction fund.”

“Don’t think that the school did nothing, knowing that the students were coming due to annexation,” Reese said. “The major problem is that there are too many students coming at a blazing rate of speed. In recent years, it’s four to five classrooms of new students per year.”

Other township residents expressed concerns about the difficulty of accommodating increasing numbers of non-English speaking students.

“I want to address this issue of non-English speaking students,” Gore said. “It is very frustrating to me as an educator.”

“As much as everybody’s said about these kids who don’t speak English, Bethel is not the only school district in the state of Ohio that is experiencing a growth of students who are coming from other countries, who don’t speak the language,” he said. “This is America, and this is a melting pot, and those people are still here, and most of them, if not all of them, are residents of this country and they have a right to free public education.”

“All of our students are going through this,” Gore said. “But that’s who we are as a country, that’s who we are as a nation, and that’s what we do; we come up with solutions to figure it out.”

City council member Mark Campbell requested that city staff research several issues related to the school issue, including questions about the Bethel Local Schools’ current cash balance, sources of revenue, and what it would cost to construct a new school for approximately 600 to 700 students in the area around the proposed annexation.

“The thought would be that with some of the overcrowding that’s happening in the elementary school, some of those kids would go to the new school,” Gore said.

City council members also discussed a moratorium on future annexations that was approved by Bethel Township Trustees in 2023, and the possibility of approving a similar agreement in the future.

“We took an incredible amount of heat for that agreement,” van Haaren said. “Basically, the tenants would not oppose the previous 268 acres for annexation in exchange for you not annexing anything north of Route 40, and basically west of State Route 201 and east of State Route 202.”

At the time, Huber Heights City Council did not approve the moratorium agreement, van Haaren said.

“I favored it then, and I favor it now,” Campbell said. “I thought it was a good idea then, and I still think it was a good idea.”

“I still support that,” he said. “I think it’s a good way to protect your borders.”

“I don’t want to lose any more land to annexation; nobody in Bethel Township does,” van Haaren said. “But if we can take a bullet now to maintain our township for 100 years or 150 years with no annexation, then I think I could live with that.”

“If there is no way forward to help with the school issue, I won’t support the annexation,” Gore said. “If we can’t find a way forward and a solution that makes sense, I’m not in favor of it.”

“We are still looking for information,” he said. “I want to find a solution, and if there is no solution then I’m not in favor of it.”