Bloomington mayor on intent to appeal annexation ruling: ‘We believe strongly in the merits of our case.’
In a statement released Thursday evening, Bloomington mayor Kerry Thomson has announced that the city of Bloomington will appeal the recent ruling of circuit court judge Nathan Nikirk, that the city’s annexation of Area 1A and Area 1B will not take place.
Thursday’s announced decision to appeal Nikirk’s decision on Area 1A and Area 1B came after a Wednesday night executive session held with Bloomington’s city council, which is a named plaintiff in the litigation.
Thomson’s statement says about Nikirk’s ruling: “While we are disappointed, we believe strongly in the merits of our case and remain hopeful about the outcome, though we understand it may take approximately a year to receive a decision on the appeal.”
Thursday’s announcement follows the city’s decision about three weeks ago, to appeal another recent annexation ruling, also made by Nikirk, on five other areas. That ruling concerned a question of constitutional law, involving a 2019 statute enacted by the state legislature.
Monroe County government leaders were notified about Thomson’s decision to appeal the Area 1A and Area 1B rulings in an email message sent before noon on Thursday.
Thomson’s Thursday announcement states that the city’s sewer connection policy will remain unchanged. That policy says that the city of Bloomington will not extend sewer service to terrority outside the city of Bloomington, without a valid petition for voluntary annexation. For the petition of a property to be annexed voluntarily, the property has to be immediately adjacent to the city boundary.
The court of appeals will not review the merits of the Area 1A and Area 1B annexations completely from scratch. The standards that will be applied are laid out in a key precedent issued by the Indiana Supreme Court in 2019 (Town of Brownsburg v. Fight Against Brownsburg Annexation).
From the Brownsburg opinion: “For purposes of appellate review, that means we review what the trial court found and concluded, not what the municipality did. In other words, we ask not whether the record supports the municipality’s decision to enact the annexation ordinance, but whether it supports the trial court’s decision to uphold or reject the annexation.”
The opinion continues: “We will not set aside findings unless they are clearly erroneous—i.e., the record contains no facts supporting them either directly or inferentially. Id. This standard is highly deferential. If a factual finding is plausible given the entire record, we will not reverse it even if we would have decided the matter differently were we sitting as finders of fact.”
But legal conclusions are treated differently by the appellate court from findings of fact: “[W]e ask whether the findings support the court’s legal conclusions. We give no deference to conclusions of law but review them de novo.”
According to the Brownsburg opinion, the court can conclude the trial court clearly erred, “if the court applied the wrong legal standard to properly found facts.”
