Larry and Sally Arnold v. City of Terre Haute

SHEPARD, Chief Justice.

How do you count the remonstrators to an annexation in order to tell whether a majority of the owners of land have remonstrated, as required by Ind.Code § 36-4-3-11(a)?

The simplest practice has been to count the number of parcels and then count how many of these parcels have owners who have objected, without attempting to account for the fact that some people may own more than one parcel in the annexed territory. This has explicitly been the law at least since City of Fort Wayne v. Landowners, 564 N.E.2d 297 (Ind.Ct.App.1990), trans. denied.

In this case, a divided Court…