Fishers looks to annex 994 acres, add up to 3,000 residents

Fishers is advancing a long-held plan to annex about 1,000 acres along its southeastern boundary. It’s a move that would encompass the largest chunk of unincorporated land along the ever-growing Hamilton County city’s borders.

City leaders plan to annex 994 acres in unincorporated Hamilton County where 2,500 to 3,000 people live, primarily in two large subdivisions but also in small neighborhoods and individual lots that retain a more rural feel.

If the annexation is successful, Mayor Scott Fadness said, it will increase Fishers’ population to somewhere between 107,000 and 109,000 residents, creating more distance from Carmel (102,000 residents) as the largest city in Hamilton County.

Fishers will also be within shouting distance of replacing Evansville (115,000 residents) as the third-largest city in Indiana, according to U.S. Census Bureau estimates. Fort Wayne, with a population of 264,000, is the second-largest Indiana city, behind Indianapolis at 970,000.

Fadness said the annexation zone is the most developed unincorporated area along Fishers’ borders.

“It’s a large annexation by a lot of measures,” he said. “You know, 2,500 people, that would be a large, small town in Indiana, and we’re annexing that number of people, so it’s a significant addition to the community.”

The annexation would add $400 million in assessed value to Fishers, according to Fishers Economic Development Specialist Jordin Alexander, who is leading the annexation process for the city.

The annexation covers an area roughly bounded by East 113th Street to the north, the Hamilton County line to the east, areas south of East 101st Street to the south and areas around Florida Road to the west. Two Fishers parks—Fishers Agripark and Flat Fork Creek Park—neighbor areas that would be annexed into the city.

Annexing the area has been on the city’s to-do list for years. And with hundreds of remonstrance waivers recorded for parcels there, it’s unlikely the plan will face much of a challenge.

The Hamilton County Commissioners granted Fishers zoning jurisdiction over the area in 2005. The city also manages sewer utilities, fire response and emergency medical services there.

Students living there attend Hamilton Southeastern School Corp. schools.

Responsibility for stormwater management, road repairs and snow removal, which are all currently provided by Hamilton County, would shift to Fishers. The city would also manage policing, which is primarily handled by the Hamilton County Sheriff’s Office with assistance from the Fishers and Fortville police departments. The Hancock County town of Fortville would continue to provide drinking water to the area.

By the time the annexation would take effect next year, Fishers is expected to have a citywide trash collection contract with a single company. The city reviewed three bids this summer by garbage collection companies and on Tuesday recommended Phoenix-based Republic Services Inc. The Fishers City Council is expected to vote on a 10-year contract for Republic this fall.

Property taxes for the area would increase following the annexation. For example, the owner of a property with an assessed value of $300,000 could expect to pay $341 more a year, while an owner of a property assessed at $2.5 million would pay an additional $1,752 annually, according to a taxpayer-impact projection worksheet provided by the city.

Diana Callahan, a resident of the Vermillion subdivision in the proposed annexation area, said she assumed, when she and her family moved to their house about five years ago, that Fishers would annex her neighborhood.

“We knew this day would come, so we’ve been gearing up for it,” Callahan said. “I welcome it. We already get a lot of the services Fishers offers … so I don’t really expect much to change. But it will be nice to have it officially.”

Robin Keerns, a resident of an older neighborhood near the border with Fortville, said her biggest questions are about the impact of the change in stormwater service and how the annexation will impact her taxes.

She said some of her neighbors are angry because they associate themselves more with Fortville than Fishers, but she understands why Fishers wants to annex her neighborhood.

“We’re already getting all of those services, so there’s really no gain,” Keerns said. “But then there’s the other side of that, and the practical side is, we are getting those services, and we should be paying for them. I understand the city’s need.”

A long-planned move

Fadness said plans to bring the area into Fishers have been on the city’s radar for years. In 2006, the city rezoned land for the Flat Fork and Vermillion housing developments along Connecticut Road.

Indiana law says an area can be annexed into a city or town only if it is contiguous to that municipality’s boundaries. Fishers was years away from expanding southeast when the Flat Fork and Vermillion developments received approval.

“So, we said, ‘Well, once Fishers grows out to you, then we will annex at the appropriate time,’” Fadness said. “And so, it’s taken us a number of years to kind of grow out to that point in Fishers. But now that we’re there and we meet our contiguity rules, we’re just executing on the agreement that was set with the developer back in 2006.”

Fishers notified residents who live in the affected area by letter in June. And city leaders are conducting a series of public information meetings that will continue next week at 9 a.m. Monday and 4 p.m. Tuesday and Wednesday at the Fishers Municipal Complex.

Next month, city officials plan to introduce an annexation ordinance and adopt a fiscal plan. A public hearing would follow in October, and the ordinance could receive City Council approval in December. A remonstrance period would last from December to May, and the annexation could go into effect next June.

Residents who live in the area are most interested in learning about practical matters like garbage collection, water and what the annexation means for people who have a Fortville mailing address, said Tarsis Lopez, who lives in Flat Fork with his wife and two sons.

Lopez said residents are also talking about what the annexation means for Fortville, a town of about 4,700 people that is just across the county line and has developed plans for its own growth.

“I think there’s a part of this around, ‘What’s the practical way that we look at this?’” Lopez said. “And there’s another part of this around, ‘Do we have an affinity to a certain town based on how we identify with that?’”

Most residents who live in the annexation area reside in the Flat Fork and Vermillion subdivisions. As those developments were built, residents signed remonstrance waivers, which prohibit landowners from challenging an annexation in exchange for city services, such as sewer connection. Waivers are attached to a property, regardless of whether the landowner who signed it still lives there.

“A lot of those waivers came as that was built out,” Alexander said.

Additionally, residents in Rosanna Village, a small neighborhood along East 101st Street, east of Flat Fork Creek Park, signed remonstrance waivers about two years ago when Fishers replaced failing septic tanks and installed sewer utilities.

In total, remonstrance waivers are attached to 710, or 74%, of the 960 parcels in the annexation area. That puts Fishers beyond the reach of any potential legal challenges to its annexation.

In Indiana, an annexation is automatically invalidated if 65% of landowners remonstrate. An annexation can be fought through the court system if 51% of landowners remonstrate. In 2015, the Legislature passed an annexation-reform law that limited municipalities’ power to perform involuntary annexations and eased the process for residents to fight annexations.

Matt Greller, CEO of AIM, formerly the Indiana Association of Cities and Towns, said municipally initiated annexations—like the one Fishers is undertaking—have a lengthier process now than before the annexation-reform law.

“We’ve gone from a very pro-annexation state 20 years ago to a very restrictive state today,” Greller said.

Over the past couple of decades, Hamilton County has seen multi-year annexation battles, when Fishers looked to annex Geist and when Carmel sought to annex Home Place. In both cases, the city eventually won.

If Fishers’ annexation effort is successful, residents would become part of the city’s Southeast District. They would likely be represented by City Council member Pete Peterson, who said he “gained his notoriety” as a leader of the group Geist United Opposition, which organized and fought the annexation of about 2,400 Geist homes. Ultimately, Geist became part of Fishers in 2009.

Peterson said he does not anticipate much opposition to Fishers’ current annexation effort.

“There’s a couple [of] little areas that have been there for a while, and I mean a long while, but that’s far in the minority of the group in the annexation area,” he said. “So I think [most residents] probably looked at it and went, ‘Eh, I thought we were in Fishers.’”

Across the border

However, across the county line in Fortville, which borders both Hamilton and Madison counties, there are some ill feelings about Fishers’ plans.

The town recently updated its comprehensive plan and sought to annex part of the territory Fishers wants, roughly north of East 96th Street, east of Cyntheanne Road, south of East 113th Street and west of the county line.

“Most of those residents think they live in Fortville. They have a Fortville mailing address,” Fortville Town Council President Tonya Davis said. “They’re closer to us than they would be to Fishers, and that was another reason for doing that. Plus, they call our planning administrator all the time for permits and things. They think they are already Fortville.”

Davis added that previous annexations by Fishers have come closer to Fortville than she would like, leading to frustration over the current annexation plan. But Fortville’s plan would have been an uphill battle, seeing that the area in question is in Hamilton County, not Hancock County.

The Fortville Town Council discussed the possibility of annexing territory within the Fishers plan at its July 1 meeting. But those plans now seem unlikely to come to pass.

Davis, Town Council Vice President Ryan Rummell and Planning and Building Director Adam Zaklikowski met with Fadness to discuss Fishers’ and Fortville’s plans in the area.

“We got shut down pretty fast,” Davis said. “We really just wanted to have the conversation with the people for them to make a decision, but I think that, obviously, we’re not going to get the chance to do that.”

Fadness said he explained to Fortville leaders the history of the area going back 20 years, the intent of the annexation and the fact that most parcels in the area have remonstrance waivers. He said the Hamilton County Commissioners would need to approve an annexation from a community outside the county, and he doesn’t “believe that there’s any intent or will on the commissioners’ part to see that happen.”

“We had a good discussion, and I think they understand why we’re moving forward,” Fadness said. “And we will continue to do so on the process that we’re on.”•