Nichols Hills to conduct public hearings on annexation matters

City council and planning commission members will hold public hearings this month on three Nichols Hills annexation proposals.

The city is considering the annexation of property that until recently was in Oklahoma City’s corporate limits and where the Nichols Hills public works operations are housed. The other two proposals are to correct the legal descriptions for residential areas that were annexed into Nichols Hills more than 60 years ago.

The planning commission will conduct a public hearing on the three annexation proposals at 5:30 p.m. Tuesday in the public works meeting room, 1009 NW 75. The city council will hold a similar hearing at 5:30 p.m. May 9, also in the public works meeting room.

The public works building and utilities yard are located at the east edge of the city limits, on NW 75, east of N Western Avenue, and were built on land that until this month laid within the city limits of Oklahoma City. Members of the Oklahoma City Council voted April 18 to de-annex the land so it can be annexed by Nichols Hills.City Manager Shane Pate said Nichols Hills officials are updating the site plan for the public works site, and the updated plan might include a covered storage building and additional covered parking spaces, to be financed from bond issue proceeds.

“It makes it a lot easier to make these improvements if (the property) is in Nichols Hills’s corporate limits rather than Oklahoma City,” Pate said.

Other public works site improvements that have not been specified could be added to the site plan later, he said.

Pate said the other two tracts — one on the west side of Nichols Hills and the other on the north side — are residential areas that involve a total of 12 homes. The ordinances annexing the areas originally were approved in the 1950s, but with incorrect legal descriptions, Pate said.

Pate said Nichols Hills officials are confident the two areas in question are legally within the Nichols Hills corporate limits. He cited the official corporate boundary map on file with the ad valorem tax division of the Oklahoma Tax Commission, which he said shows the areas to be within the Nichols Hills corporate boundary. The map is the official state map for municipality boundaries, he said.

“We’re just cleaning up the legal descriptions with respect to those properties,” he said.

Pate said Nichols Hills officials are contacting property owners to gain their consent before the city council acts.

“There have been no protests so far. We have obtained written consent from most of the property owners,” Pate said. He said some property owners are still reviewing the consent forms.

Pate said considering all three annexation issues at once will save money on legal publication costs.