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Ordinance 22 December 1975 · decided 27 September 1979 · rehearing denied 27 November 1979
On 22 December 1975, at a regularly held year-end meeting, the Town Board of North Liberty unanimously adopted Annexation Ordinance No. 4-1975. The territory it took was no compact addition: the Court of Appeals' opinion describes "a strip of land which extends on either side of State Road 23 varying in width from 345 feet to 352 feet" — a corridor annexation, reaching out of the town along its highway. Robert D. Whitmer and other owners of the annexed land remonstrated, and the trial court upheld the ordinance; the owners appealed on two grounds, that the ordinance was improperly adopted and that the strip was not contiguous to the existing town. The Court of Appeals of Indiana, Third District, in an opinion by Hoffman, J., reported at 395 N.E.2d 280 (182 Ind. App. 236), worked through both. On procedure, the court held the town's enactment complied with the governing statutes of the Cities and Towns Act of 1969, that the ordinance's passage was unanimous, and that the board's simultaneous approval of the required fiscal plan and timetable for serving the annexed area sufficed although the plan was not incorporated into the ordinance's text. On contiguity, the court sustained the annexation against the strip's shape under the 1969 act's requirements. The judgment below was affirmed; rehearing was denied on 27 November 1979. The case is the town's one reported appellate decision in the record reached, and the annexed corridor is part of the town the map shows today — a controversy that changed the town's boundaries, which is what this section's third test asks.