09-05-2025
As Indianapolis expands the Monon Trail, homeowners say land grab would swallow backyards
Thomas Taylor has owned a home along the former Monon Railroad long enough to remember the rumble of passing trains. For the last few decades, trains have been replaced by bicyclists that zip past on the Monon Trail, weaving their way between walkers, joggers and parents pushing strollers.
But there's a problem with the rail trail's much-lauded conversion, according to Taylor, a Forest Hills homeowner since 1970. Before the city of Indianapolis paved the trail back in the 1990s, officials did not give adjacent residents like Taylor the "just compensation" for public use that he, along with some property rights experts, believes they were owed under the Fifth Amendment and Indiana law.
Residents in the Forest Hills and Canterbury-Chatard neighborhoods are scrutinizing this history as the city looks to widen the trail from 10-12 to 14 feet between 56th Street and Hamilton County. To do so, city officials are seeking to buy enough land for a public right-of way along the Monon that could span up to 66 feet wide in some areas.
Although the city is offering payments from $1,000 to $10,000 based on independent appraisals, many of the current homeowners say they have no interest in losing all that land. In some cases, residents say, the city's trying to buy property where they have installed fences, garden beds or pools.
The land dispute dates back to 1987, when CSX Corp. stopped operating the Monon Railroad. At that point, homeowners like Taylor and some property rights attorneys say, the land rights should have automatically reverted to the residents.
CSX had acquired only a right-of-way easement — a right to use other people's land for the sole purpose of running a railroad — that it forfeited upon shutting down the tracks, they argue.
Instead, CSX sold the obsolete railbed to the city two years later for $1.5 million. The city ripped out the trash-covered tracks and completed the 10-mile Monon Trail in 1999, now a treasured public good used by more than a million people each year.
"What the city did when they came out and took control of the Monon Trail and developed it for a trail was improper," Tom Malapit, a property rights attorney with Malapit & Rochford, said to a room full of concerned homeowners at a neighborhood meeting May 7. "They should have, under normal eminent domain, come to (the) property owners and made (them) an offer."
The city disputes Malapit's interpretation of decades-old Hamilton County court rulings that settled ownership along the Monon.
When CSX sold the railroad bed to the city, the firm also transferred its right-of-way easement, Department of Public Works spokesman Kyle Bloyd said in an emailed statement. That easement granted the city the right to use the land, DPW says.
In fact, city officials argue that homeowners who have built fences or garden beds close to the trail in the last three decades have encroached on the city's easement. The city now wants to buy the property it already has the right to use.
"In order to clear up title to this land, to expand the Monon Trail, and to continue the operation of the Trail for and on behalf of the public," the DPW statement says, "the city has determined that the best course of action is to acquire fee title to the land on which it currently owns an easement."
The situation is escalating as DPW moves beyond making initial cash offers to invoking eminent domain, the government's constitutional right to claim private land for public use and pay just compensation to the owners.
There's precedent for using eminent domain against homeowners along the Monon who resist government land-taking. The city of Carmel pursued eminent domain lawsuits against at least eight land owners to pave the way for the 2002 opening of the trail north of the county line.
DPW has already widened the trail south of 56th Street after taking over adjacent properties, officials told IndyStar. The city has acquired more than half of about 300 total parcels along the Monon from 10th Street to 96th Street and is in the process of buying roughly 60 more tracts, according to DPW.
But officials always knew the area between 56th Street and Kessler Boulevard, where homeowners have built especially close to the trail, could pose more issues.
"The other (homes), in that Forest Hills and Canterbury Park area, we knew would be more challenging because of the amount of encroachments," DPW Project Manager Gretchen Zortman said.
DPW says the city is negotiating the size of land taken on a case-by-case basis among the roughly 70 parcels in those neighborhoods and will compromise in some instances, as it did with a homeowner whose brick wall would have been costly to remove. The city may also pay to help move fences and relocate other encroachments, DPW officials said.
More: Now beloved, the Monon Trail was once controversial plan to transform trash-filled tracks
Taylor, the Forest Hills homeowner, recently heard from a land acquisition contractor hired by DPW, who offered him about $5,000 for a portion of his backyard.
Taylor is adamant that he doesn't want to sell any of his property and that the city is in the wrong. He and other homeowners could work with property rights attorneys to fight the city's eminent domain lawsuits or try to minimize how much land the city takes.
"They finally discovered that we could sue them for what they have done," Taylor told IndyStar, "and now they're going to try to use eminent domain to take it back and pay a pittance for what it's worth and use this smoke screen of widening the Monon."
Most of the homeowners agree the Monon Trail is a boon for their neighborhood and want the city to widen and repave the sections north of 56th Street for the first time. But many say the cash offers are far too low and would take land away from what they consider their backyards.
Chris Carson, a Canterbury-Chatard homeowner, said the city is offering him about $6,000 for a 33-foot wide tract of land that extends past his fence into his backyard. He wants to limit the land taken to his fence line and the city's total right-of-way to a 20-foot-wide corridor.
"I want the trail to be widened and repaved. I don't really want to be paid," Carson said. "I want to keep my backyard."
Courtney Cady and her husband bought their home near Canterbury Park in 2020 because they wanted to live right on the Monon. After the recent neighborhood meeting, though, she was kneeling along the trail she loves with a tape measurer and despairing over the results.
A small staircase leads up to a newly installed $10,000 fence that shields Cady's yard from passersby. Both the staircase, which was there before she moved in, and the new fence would likely fall within the 66-foot corridor. So would the honeysuckle bushes that screen the backyard from the trail.
The city is offering Cady only about $1,100 for a 33-foot-wide swath of her land, she said. She would be willing to donate a smaller portion along the path if the city agreed to leave the rest of her property alone.
"If they were to come into our property and cut down trees and be in our yard, I would rather not have this home," she said. "That's totally impeding why we bought this property and put up a half-privacy fence and have this greenery."
