Municipal City of South Bend v. Kimsey
| Decision Date | 15 January 2003 |
| Docket Number | No. 71S03-0203-CV-183.,71S03-0203-CV-183. |
| Parties | The MUNICIPAL CITY OF SOUTH BEND, Indiana, Appellant (Defendant Below), v. John KIMSEY and Denise Kimsey; Bradley Hall and Carole Hall; Terry Trethewey and Cheryl Trethewey; together with the remaining property owners who are signatories hereto and who are too numerous to be included in the caption of this remonstrance complaint, Appellees (Plaintiffs Below). |
| Court | Indiana Supreme Court |
Aladean M. DeRose, South Bend, IN, Attorney for Appellant.
Don G. Blackmond, Lynn M. Butcher, South Bend, IN, Attorneys for Appellees.
ON PETITION TO TRANSFER
Article IV, Section 23 of the Indiana Constitution prohibits special legislation where a general law can be made applicable. We hold that this provision is violated by a 1993 law applicable only to St. Joseph County and permitting a majority of landowners in an affected area of that county to block annexation by a municipality.
Until 1993, if a municipality sought to annex adjacent territory, it needed to satisfy only the requirements of Indiana Code section 36-4-3-13. That section, which remains the law today, set forth a list of conditions ranging from the population and geographic makeup of the area to be annexed to the details that must be included in a fiscal plan prepared by the annexing municipality. If these requirements were met, opposition by a given percentage of landowners was not enough to block annexation.
In 1993, the Indiana General Assembly added a new subsection (g)1 to section 13. That subsection applied only to counties with a population between 200,000 and 300,000, and granted the right to challenge and defeat annexation if, inter alia, a majority of the landowners in the affected area opposed it.2 Ind.Code § 36-4-3-13(g) (2002). At the time this provision was enacted, and ever since then, only St. Joseph County fell within these population parameters. As a result, at the time relevant to this lawsuit, only in St. Joseph County could a given number of affected landowners block an annexation simply by opposing it. In 1999, a new subsection was added affecting every county except St. Joseph and requiring opposition of sixty-five percent, not just a simple majority, to defeat annexation. The net result is that today the statute requires opposition of sixty-five percent of the affected landowners to defeat a municipal annexation in ninety-one of our ninety-two counties, but in St. Joseph County a simple majority is sufficient.3
On July 22, 1996, the City of South Bend, acting through its Common Council, adopted an ordinance providing for the annexation of the "Copperfield Annexation Area" in St. Joseph County. Copperfield area residents filed a remonstrance and presented a petition in opposition to annexation purporting to contain the signatures of a majority of Copperfield landowners. After the trial court denied the City's motion to dismiss the remonstrance, the City filed a counterclaim seeking a declaratory judgment that subsection (g) was unconstitutional special legislation in violation of Article IV, Section 23 of the Indiana Constitution. That section provides, in relevant part: "[I]n all ... cases where a general law can be made applicable, all laws shall be general...."
The trial court denied the City's motion, holding that subsection (g) was constitutional "general" legislation concerning "[t]he loss of rural land" and "[a]rguably... reflects a political decision by the General Assembly that urbanization in this state should be restricted and that: (a) counties of more than 300,000 people have already lost their rural character and (b) that counties of less than 200,000 people are not at risk." Because the trial court viewed subsection (g) as "general" legislation as that term appears in Article IV, it did not address the question whether, if this were a "special" law, a general law "can be made applicable."
The City subsequently filed a unilateral "stipulation of facts," to which the remonstrators did not object, and the trial court proceeded to address the merits of the case without trial. Having determined that the remonstrators' petition was sufficient, the trial court blocked the annexation. The Court of Appeals affirmed the trial court. City of South Bend v. Kimsey, 751 N.E.2d 805, 812 (Ind.Ct.App.2001). This Court granted transfer.
Limits on "special legislation" are found, "in some form or other, in most state constitutions." Osborne M. Reynolds, Local Government Law 85-86 (1982). Their purpose is "to prevent state legislatures from granting preferences to some local units or areas within the state, and thus creating an irregular system of laws, lacking state-wide uniformity." Id. at 86. This "irregularity" is not in itself the only perceived evil. In the view of the proponents of these provisions, if special laws are permitted, the result is perceived to be "a situation in which it [becomes] customary for members of the legislature to vote for the local bills of others in return for comparable cooperation from them (a practice often termed `logrolling')." Id. In simple terms, these anti-logrolling provisions are grounded in the view that as long as a law affects only one small area of the state, voters in most areas will be ignorant of and indifferent to it. As a result, many legislators will be tempted, some would say expected, to support the proposals of the legislators from the affected area, even if they deem the proposal to be bad policy that they could not support if it affected their own constituents.4
In fact, the drafters of the 1851 Indiana Constitution saw one of their principal challenges to be reining in a "large and constantly increasing number" of special laws. At the Constitutional Debates, John Pettit, of Tippecanoe County, described special legislation as "the whole error—the whole incongruity—the whole oppression of our law, and almost the whole necessity of calling this Convention." 2 Reports of the Debates and Proceedings of the Convention for the Revision of the Constitution of the State of Indiana 1771 (1850). Others complained of the diversion from matters of statewide concern generated by an excessive volume of local legislation. Governor Paris Dunning addressed the General Assembly on this note:
Special legislation is a growing evil which has attracted much attention amongst the masses of the people, and to which much well founded opposition exists in the public mind. Indeed, it has for years past engaged full three-fourths of the time of the General Assembly, to the exclusion (from their due consideration) of many other questions of great importance to the people of the State.
1 Charles Kettleborough, Constitution Making in Indiana 195 (Ind. Historical Bureau ed. 1971) (1916). The drafters responded to these concerns by adopting Sections 22 and 23 of Article IV. Article IV, Section 22 prohibits the General Assembly from passing local or special laws to accomplish certain enumerated results, none of which is relevant here.5 In addition to Section 22's prohibition of "special" legislation on specified topics, Article IV, Section 23 added a residual demand for "general" legislation: "In all the cases enumerated in the preceding section, and in all other cases where a general law can be made applicable, all laws shall be general, and of uniform operation throughout the State."
Although the text of Section 23 has remained unaltered since it was placed in the Constitution in 1851, it has been subject to a variety of interpretations over the intervening 151 years. It was initially thought that Article IV presented no justiciable issue. This view was first articulated in Gentile v. State, 29 Ind. 409 (1868), and continued through the nineteenth century and into the early part of the twentieth. As this Court put it in Bd. of Comm'rs v. Fetter, 193 Ind. 288, 296, 139 N.E. 451, 454 (1923):
Upon the authority of numerous decided cases from this court, and from the courts of other states which have constitutional limitations akin to the one here in question, the rule is firmly fixed that the question whether or not a general law can be made applicable, or that a special law is in violation of said section of the constitution because a general law can be made applicable, is necessarily one of legislative discretion, and not one of judicial determination.
In Groves v. Bd. of Comm'rs, 209 Ind. 371, 199 N.E. 137 (1936), this Court moved from the view that Article IV, Section 23 presented no justiciable issue to the doctrine that statutes general in form were "general" for purposes of Article IV even if they applied in practical terms to only one or a few counties. The Court addressed a statute applying only to counties "having a population of not less than 250,000 nor more than 400,000, and having three or more cities, each with a population of 50,000 or more." Id. at 375, 199 N.E. at 139. Lake County alone met those criteria. The Court held: "If the act is broad enough to apply to all counties of the state under the same circumstances, it cannot be condemned." Id. at 376, 199 N.E. at 140. Whatever the realistic prospect that another county might ever meet these parameters and also contain three cities, each of 50,000 population, there remains at least the theoretical prospect that smaller counties could over time grow to meet these criteria. Similarly, Lake County might lose one of its three cities of 50,000, or fall outside the 250,000-to-400,000 bracket. Based on these logical if practically remote possibilities, this Court held that "[u]nder such circumstances, the law is general in its application and not local or special," id., and inquired no further.
A variation of complete deference to classification by population upheld several statutes against Article IV attack on the basis that...
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