Bloomington prevails in court, gets extra time for abatement of Davis’s Washington Street property
In a ruling issued on Tuesday (Oct. 15), Monroe County circuit court judge Emily Salzmann found in favor of the city of Bloomington in its years-long attempt to enforce what it considers to be violations of city code on Joe Davis’s Washington Street property.
By Thursday morning, Davis had already filed with the court a hand-written notice of appeal.
Responding to an emailed B Square question, the city’s communications director, Desiree DeMolina wrote: “We’re currently working with our teams to ensure the next steps are carried out according to the court’s order. However, we aren’t able to provide further details on specific actions at this moment.”
Davis told The B Square he became aware of the court’s order only when on Thursday morning he saw city staff making video recordings of his yard from the neighboring property. That’s why he suspected a ruling must have finally been issued, after the July 30 court hearing. He then went to the court to file his notice of appeal and get a copy of Salzmann’s ruling.
Bloomington’s local law [BMC 6.06.020] makes it unlawful to “throw, place, or scatter any garbage, recyclable materials or yard waste over or upon any premises, street, alley, either public or private,…”
It’s the city’s HAND (Housing and Neighborhood Development) department that administers compliance with that part of the city code.
Davis contends that the items the city considers to be garbage are in fact his building materials he is using for an ongoing project, or art installations.
From Salzmann’s ruling:
The theme of Petitioner’s testimony is this: HAND calling my items “garbage” or “rubbish” doesn’t make it so. … As a counterpoint to the crux of Petitioner’s argument, just because Petitioner calls these items ‘construction materials’ and ‘installed art’ does not make it so when the municipal code defines such items as garbage and rubbish.
What Davis challenged was an order of abatement granted by the city’s board of public works. An order of abatement allows city staff to go onto private property to correct code violations. The order was good for a year, dating from the time of the notice of violation that the city’s HAND department had issued—on Aug. 17, 2023.
That means the order of abatement has expired—but Salzmann’s Tuesday order granted the city’s request for an extension of the abatement order, because Davis’s trial tactics had effectively run out the clock on it.
Salzmann extended the order of abatement on Davis’s property until June 26, 2025. The time between Salzmann’s order to that date is 254 days. That’s the number of days that were left on the city’s one-year abatement order, when the emergency temporary injunction on that order was imposed by the court. At the time, the case was in the hands of judge Catherine Stafford, who recused herself.
Salzmann’s order giving the city 254 more days relies on the wording in Stafford’s order that grants the temporary emergency injunction. That wording goes like this [emphasis added]: “This court grants this temporary emergency injunction to preserve the status quo until the new court can have [sic] to have a hearing on the matters.”
Salzmann analyzed preserving the status quo as preserving the number of days left at the time when the emergency temporary injunction was granted.
The extension of time on the abatement order is a big difference between a similar legal preceding against Davis that started in 2022 and concluded in August 2023—with an order issued by Monroe County circuit court judge Kara Krothe.
Like Salzmann, Krothe found in favor of the city of Bloomington. But in a separate ruling, which included a decision on the question of granting the request from the city to extend the city’s abatement order, Krothe wrote: “The Abatement Order which is the one at issue in this case expired on August 11, 2023. The Defendants [city of Bloomington] asked the Court to extend the Abatement Order but provided no authority upon which the Court could do so.”
Davis filed a notice of appeal of Krothe’s basic ruling on the earlier case, because the city had started enforcement based on her ruling, with just a few days to go in the abatement order. In light of the notice of appeal, the city stopped its enforcement action.
The Indiana Court of Appeals dismissed the case in March of this year, based on Davis’s failure to file required briefs on time.
Davis has been in the news over the last year for other reasons, including his unsuccessful attempt to appear on the ballot as a mayoral candidate, his registration as a current write-in candidate for an at-large county council seat, and his filing of a challenge to the 2025 city of Bloomington budget.
