IN Court of Appeals Rules in City’s Favor in Old Y Case, Concluding Nearly $3.5 Million Owed Share

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The Indi­ana Court of Appeals on Octo­ber 10^th, 2023, ruled to reim­burse the $3.1 mil­lion in dam­ages plus inter­est, for a total of near­ly $3.5 mil­lion to the City of Mar­i­on in the ​“Old YMCA” case which began in 2017.

City attor­ney, Tom Hunt, stat­ed the rul­ing is extreme­ly good news for the City of Mar­i­on. ​“It proves that you should always do the right thing even when it’s dif­fi­cult and when you receive crit­i­cism for it.”

The Court of Appeals’ unan­i­mous deci­sion was pub­licly filed on the morn­ing of Octo­ber 10^th, 2023. It includes a sum­ma­rized his­to­ry of the case. It is in response to defen­dant Lon­don Witte Group, LLC’s appeal fol­low­ing the ver­dict last year after oral argu­ment was held in front of the Court of Appeals on Sep­tem­ber 20^th, 2022.

The defen­dant, Lon­don Witte Group, has the right to seek trans­fer to the Indi­ana Supreme Court, but the like­li­hood of it accept­ing the case is very low. Hunt explained, ​“The Supreme Court does not have to take any case, and in fact, they take maybe less than 5 out of 100.”

May­or Jess Alum­baugh expressed, ​“I am extreme­ly pleased with the Court of Appeals’ unan­i­mous deci­sion in favor of the City of Mar­i­on and its cit­i­zens. When I was elect­ed, I was told to find out what hap­pened to the old YMCA project, and to hold those involved account­able. Even with the resis­tance we faced from with­in, we knew we were involved in a long and dif­fi­cult jour­ney that in the end, would bring account­abil­i­ty and jus­tice. Doing the right thing is not always easy, but with the over­whelm­ing sup­port we received from our com­mu­ni­ty, it was worth every bat­tle we faced.”