Politician Archive

Hello friendly mayors, one and all,

I hope this question isn't asked too often, but I couldn't find any mention of it in the Politican FAQ or in any of the threads on the first few pages, so I thought I'd start a new thread for my question.

My PA hall and house and the houses of my PA mates are in an area that just got enveloped by a town that went from outpost to village size.We need to know if we have to join the city in order to stay where we are or will we be forced to move if we don't? I've sent the town's mayor an in-game email and he seems nice enough and all that, but we're not sure if we want to stay or not and we need to know how much hassle it will be if we don't actually join the city. It's been about a week or so now since the city grew if that makes any difference.

Whether you like it or not atm you are now part of the city. You have to pay taxes if they are charged if you remain there. There is no disadvantage to declaring residence. If you dont declare residence though he can /cityban you and prevent you from accessing anything in the city if you do not. Iirc if you declate later you remain banned unless he pardons you. So I would recommend either moving or having someone run against him and vote him out of office. Then you can have your own city or nuke it if you wish(although he could then place another one and you have to start all over).

Yeah, I figured we were part of the city now based on the e-mails I got. If we decide to declare our residence in the city and later decide to move, will it be at all difficult or is it as simple as redeeding our structures outside of the city limits?

Thanks for the info and the help, FlintAH.

And no thanks to whoever it is that gets some perverse joy out of spending their time on the boards by voting one star on all posts. That's pretty much a loser no matter how you look at it, eh?

Well, I got a /tell from the mayor of the city saying that he got a notice telling him that I was a resident as of January 4th even though I hadn't gone to the City Hall to declare my residence.

Does it automatically declare you after a while if you haven't declared yourself manually? And does anyone know what the process of leaving a city is like (not from shrinking but from someone moving out)?

Thanks

You actually declare residence in your own house, not city hall. If the house that is your declared residence is in city limits then that makes you a citizen. You may have chosen to "declare residence" in your current home before the city moved in, and that may be what made you a citizen.

You can only have one declared residence at a time, so if you declared residence in a house somewhere else that would make you no longer a resident.

This may be a little off, but I think it works this way: If you are a citizen, you will have to pay the city's income tax. If you own any kind of property in city limits you pay the property tax (it is added to your maintainance). But if you are not a citizen you will only pay the property tax and not the income tax. Someone please correct me if this is wrong.

To get out of a city completely, you do have to move your houses. I know it's kind of lame to have to move since you were there first. That's why our group started our town far from anyone else's homes. I'm not sure if you can undeclare residence in a house in any way other than declaring residence in a different house. I've never tried it. But even if you do undeclare residence you will still pay the property tax on the house. However, you will not count as citizens of the city, and therefore won't help the city grow.

If you want to wait to move your houses but do not want to be citizens, see if there is an "undeclare residence" on your house terminal. If there isn't, each member of your PA who wants to stop being a city resident will need to free up one lot. Drop a small house somewhere outside of the town, and declare residence in it. You should then no longer be a citizen of the city. Take turns transfering that house to any of the other folks in your PA, and have each of them declare residence there also. Then redeed that house, and none of you should be residents anywhere. That's kind of elaborate, and you will still wind up paying any property tax on your houses. But you will no longer be official city citizens.

The mayor may really hate it if you do this, especially if their city is only village sized. City services are all dependant on having a certain sized city, and city size is determined by number of residents. So I'm sure that your PA counting as citizens is really helping their resident count. It's possible that by starting a town that close to your homes they were hoping you would just stay there and help their town's growth.

Hope that helps, and good luck whatever you decide to do.

Thanks for responding, donnah. The thing is, though, that I declared residence in my PA hall long before player cities were even implemented, let alone before the city in question went from Tier 1 to Tier 2. Plus, whenever I e-mailed the mayor asking what his plans for the city were, he said something like "you're welcome to join the city, all you have to do is go to the city hall and declare." So I was under the impression that there was a separate declaration to make yourself a member of the city, along with having declared a residence at your house. But either way, the city grew to Tier 2 and enveloped the land our houses and PA hall are on a good week ago, but his e-mail told him I was a citizen as of today, so I figured it had something to do with declaring at the city hall, thinking it automatically did that for me after a week.

At any rate, he said in his e-mail to me that he plans to keep fees as low as possible and right now he only has a 3% sales tax (as of the last time I checked -- this may have changed now that the city is Tier 3), so we may not ever move anyway. But as to your suggestion about declaring residence at a house outside the city limits, I was under the impression that only the owner could declare residence at a house, so only one person can do so. If you transfer ownership of a house after you've declared your residence there, does that 'undeclare' you?

The mayor was mistaken, city hall is only where you go to vote. I know when our town gets new residents, I'm notified of their status as citizen just as soon as they declare residence on their house terminal. It's strange that it took a whole week before you were declared as a resident when the city limits reached your hall. I've never had anything like that happen, but we started in a completely unpopulated place so we've never grown into an existing settlement.

The owner of a house is the only person who can declare residence, that's why you'd have to transfer ownership of the small anti-citizenship house around to everyone. I'm not sure if tranferring the structure means you're no longer a resident of that same house or not since I've never actually tried it. But redeeding the new house would certainly mean that no one who declared residence would still be a resident there. The part that matters is that when you declare in the temporary out-of-city-limits house, you will no longer be a resident of your PA hall, and therefore no longer a citizen of the city. As far as the game is concerned, you'd technically be homeless. When the new house is redeeded (or possibly when ownership is transferred) you wouldn't just revert to back to being a resident of the PA hall, you'd have no official residence at all. You could rejoin the city at any time just by declaring residence again in your PA hall. Of course, all this is assuming that PA halls act just like regular houses as far as residence goes.

This is all kind of theory, since you seemed to be interested in not being a citizen but not moving your homes and PA hall yet. And without moving your houses, that was the only way I could think of to stop being city citizens.

But if the city does not have an income tax, then it really doesn't matter (at least short term) if you're a citizen or not. The citizenship of your group is probably helping the city grow, so I'm sure the mayor would like for you to remain citizens!