The annexation wars: Aboite, and the courtroom tail

1978 — 2017

The pattern in the courts: Fort Wayne grew by annexation, and its neighbours fought back in court for decades. In Adams v. City of Fort Wayne (1981) the Indiana Court of Appeals held that individual taxpayers and adjoining landowners, suing other than as statutory remonstrators, had no standing to challenge an annexation at all. In the North I case (ordinance X-02-93, passed 9 March 1993, some 2,775 acres) landowners argued the city's written plan was inadequate; the courts held the remonstrance was their only remedy and affirmed the dismissal of their suit. The courthouse door, for annexation fights, was narrow by law.

Aboite: The Southwest Extended annexation — 12.86 square miles, 22,587 people, effective 1 January 2006 — was the city's hardest-fought. The city had spent millions on infrastructure in the Aboite area in advance; opponents carried the fight to the Indiana Supreme Court, which let the annexation proceed, and then to the General Assembly, where efforts to block it failed. On the first day of 2006 some 22,587 residents of Aboite Township woke up as Fort Wayne citizens.

The tail: The fight outlived the annexation by a decade. The Southwest Allen County Fire Protection District, established in 1986, kept receiving the property-tax revenue of territories the city had annexed between December 1987 and January 2006, although the Fort Wayne Fire Department now served them. In 2014 the city invoked the statute that removed annexed areas from the district; when the auditor kept paying the district, the city sued for declaratory relief in May 2016. The trial court dismissed for want of jurisdiction, treating the dispute as a tax case; on 10 August 2017 the Court of Appeals reversed and remanded — an annexation case, not a substantive tax case. The North IV annexation followed in the same years, announced in March 2016 at nearly 23 square miles and about 22,000 people across parts of four townships, drawn to take effect 1 January 2017.

Sources:

1. City of Fort Wayne v. Southwest Allen County Fire Protection District, No. 02A05-1612-PL-2883 (Ind. Ct. App., 10 August 2017) — the annexation series, the tax-revenue dispute and the reversal.
2. In re the Annexation Proposed by Ordinance No. X-02-93 and Adams v. City of Fort Wayne, 423 N.E.2d 647 (Ind. App. 1981) — the remonstrance and standing rules of the earlier fights.
3. The government record, Government, from the City of Fort Wayne's annexation history summary, 14 March 2016 — the Southwest Extended acreage and population, the Supreme Court and General Assembly fights, and the North IV figures.