Annexation: the ordinance of May 3, 1993, and Kirk v. Town of Osceola

ONE ANNEXATION IN THE RECORD REACHED · REMONSTRANCE, SUMMARY JUDGMENT, AND A CITATION THAT REACHES THE U.S. SUPREME COURT DOCKET

The town's whole annexation record, as the sources reached give it, is one ordinance and the lawsuit it caused. On May 3, 1993, the Town of Osceola passed an ordinance approving the annexation of certain real property adjacent to the town. Town Clerk Donna Reinholtz asked the Mishawaka Enterprise to publish the ordinance once, as the law required; the newspaper published it twice, on May 6 and May 13, 1993. On July 8, 1993 — within sixty days of the second publication, but more than sixty days after the first — property owners James and Marcia Kirk (the Town's own brief in the case captions her "Marsha Kirk"; both spellings print), Donna Sue Gall, Patty Hummer, and other owners of unincorporated Osceola filed a remonstrance petition and complaint in the St. Joseph Superior Court. The case turned entirely on the double publication: on February 21, 1995, Judge William T. Means granted the town summary judgment, holding that one publication was all the statute required, the second was surplusage, and the remonstrance — counted from the first, required publication — was untimely. The Indiana Court of Appeals affirmed in Kirk v. Town of Osceola, 669 N.E.2d 1060 (Ind. App. 1996), decided August 26, 1996; the Indiana Supreme Court denied transfer on February 20, 1997, without opinion; and the owners carried the case to the United States Supreme Court as a petition for writ of certiorari, No. 97-277, October Term 1997. The annexation stood. What the record reached does not give is the annexed territory itself: no acreage, legal description, or effective date for the 1993 ground appears in any source retrieved, and no other annexation ordinance — earlier or later — was found in the sources searched; the town's present limits are the surveyor's fact (its own addressing rule and the Census Bureau's boundary file state them), but its growth ordinance by ordinance is GAP-OSGOV-8, settled by the town's ordinance book and the county recorder's annexation filings. The litigation's own paper survives because it climbed: the certiorari petition and the town's opposition brief, preserved at archive.org, are this section's source, and the case remains the town's one appearance in the appellate reports.

Sources:

1. Petition for Writ of Certiorari and Brief in Opposition, Kirk v. Town of Osceola, U.S. Supreme Court No. 97-277 (October Term 1997), via archive.org: the ordinance, the two publications, the remonstrance of July 8, 1993, the summary judgment of February 21, 1995, and the appellate course.
2. Kirk v. Town of Osceola, 669 N.E.2d 1060 (Ind. App. 1996).