Several Linwood-area residents were at City Hall last Monday to protest the Spokane City Council’s intent to annex their gated neighborhood – which just happens to abut the Costco store on North Division. One woman studied the irregular boundaries on a proposed map as if she were pondering a Rorschach ink blot, then told the council that it if they turned it just so, it looked like a sinking ship.

Well, maybe. It’s clear that Spokane County officials are intent on torpedoing the expansion step that has been on the city’s agenda for years.

But despite such an ominous observation – not to mention strong opposition from county government and Fire District 9 – the council voted to send the annexation bid on to the Spokane County Boundary Review Board.

It was the right decision, although the seas ahead are choppy. County officials will try to persuade the Boundary Review Board to disallow the annexation, but in the alternative, they are also talking about launching legal action if that’s what it takes to block the city.

For the record, county officials would be suing their own constituents, because city residents are, after all, county residents, too, and they pay taxes to both entities. If it all sounds wasteful, that’s only because it is – about what you’d expect from a cumbersome, duplicative governing structure laden with inefficiency.

Naturally, the territorial clash between city and county involves money. The 134-acre area that the city covets has an assessed value of $50 million and represents more than $1.2 million in added revenues, much of it sales taxes collected by Costco. Spokane city leaders have offered to smooth the changeover by replacing lost tax collections to both the county and Fire District 9 for three years.

But this tension is a predictable result of growth and development that has sent urban density rippling outward from the city core, spilling beyond the city limits and into what used to be rural outlands. Unlike other urban counties in Washington, Spokane County has not kept up. It retains the farm-to-market form of government assigned to counties from statehood. No concrete steps have been taken toward a county charter system that would be more suited for governing packed residential and commercial patterns. A reasonable plan to consolidate city and county into one governmental body was rejected by voters whose fears were fanned by talk during the campaign of city imperialism.

So we’re stuck with spreading urban patterns that remain outside the city but rely on city sewer and water services for which property owners once agreed not to oppose annexation. Now that the city is trying to culminate that bargain, opponents call it robbery.

Nobody suggests disconnecting the utility lines, however.

The state’s Growth Management Act, meanwhile, calls for citylike areas to be within cities. And in the absence of a charter county, or a unified government, the most likely mechanism for making that happen is city annexation of adjoining, urban-density properties.

It’s true that the city of Spokane has pursued annexation clumsily. The county, meanwhile, has been contrary and sluggish in carrying out its own obligations under the Growth Management Act.

For now, though, both city and county officials have a duty to their shared constituents to work cooperatively to make local government sensible and seaworthy. Suing each other is no place to begin.