I-69 construction reduces family's property

Bill Boyd takes in the changes as he walks past piles of his mangled trees. His dust-crusted brown boots reacquaint themselves with the land he once openly walked and his cattle freely roamed.

He and his wife, Jan, can’t go on their property on this unseasonably warm, October day. A court order threatens legal action if they trespass, they say.

That land now belongs to the state. Part of the Boyds’ land in Bloomfield, Ind., sits in the path of constructing Interstate 69, which will connect Indianapolis to Evansville.

It’s been under construction since 2008, though Section 4 of the project, where the Boyds reside, broke ground in April 2012, pushing building forward into Greene County and into the Boyds’ backyard.

It’s a process the Boyds say has been marked by negligence by the Indiana Department of Transportation. INDOT, they say, has disregarded state laws in an infuriating push to complete the project, skipping standard procedures.

It has created the feeling that they’re among the few voices combating a seemingly untouchable system fueled and corrupted by politics. They want to let the state know they have a dissenting voice, and that despite many legal setbacks, they’re still fighting.

As far as the eye can see, the cleared, middle course clearly outlines the future construction. It’s a parted Red Sea of trees, allowing for the future passage of Indiana’s vehicles.

The state now can build on the almost 14 acres Bill walks on, leaving him and his wife with about 33. Excavators and bulldozers roar and tick as they morph the land, the clanging of industry filling the usually quiet pasture air. The historic Civil War-era buildings from before the Boyd family ownership began in 1919, as well as other structures built by Jan’s grandfather in the 1940s dot the land, as do family memories. The farm was a weekend escape for Jan and Bill, who live and raised their family in Indianapolis.

But more than that, it was a promise of future peace in retirement and a source of continued memories for their children and five grandchildren.

“You cannot put a price, you can’t put a value on family history,” Bill says.

The state said it can: $51,700.

* * *

Jan sat on a tightly rolled bale of hay with her eyes trained north on the construction. The bales sit near new metal fencing the state put up to contain its work and the Boyds. She doesn’t playfully jump from bale to bale like her grandkids, who scamper down to the branch for the chance to catch minnows, or if they’re lucky, a real live frog. No, she sits and watches the workers in their yolk yellow machines mold her earth, fill in her ravines and grind her trees to mulch.

Before I-69 came, however, the farm rested, removed from urban bustle. It’s a land of front porches lined with fall pumpkins and scarecrows are plentiful. No trespassing signs are as common as the pickup trucks parked on the gravel driveways. The Boyds’ land, which they affectionately call “down-home,” is one of sweeping meadows, hilly inclines and a forested backdrop.

Drivers cross a small bridge to pass over the stream that cuts through the land. An unpaved road leads up to the small white house — past the tire swing — where Jan’s grandparents lived out most their lives. When darkness blankets it all in the evening, the stars shine in full force, marred only by a few lights from the nearby county road. It’s a quiet land.

Strips of paneling shine freshly white while others toward the top of the house peel, awaiting their fresh coat. It matches the rusting, white painted metal table and chairs in the front lawn. Jan is only midway through her summer repainting work. She hasn’t worked in seven years, and as of just more than a year ago, she hasn’t called Indianapolis her home. She now lives nearly full time on the land she bought from her grandmother. Bill still holds down a job in Indy and drives down on weekends to tend to the land and prepare the latest filings in the ongoing state and federal lawsuits.

“Her job is taking care of this place,” Bill said, as well as “keepin’ the contractors in line.”

If something strikes Jan as suspicious, she takes out her camera and documents it. They chuckled, knowing her vigilant presence near the border as the crews work, camera in hand, irks the state.

She’s defending what’s hers, she said, doing the work most haven’t to challenge the state’s steamrolling land grab.

“We are not terrible, mean people,” Jan said.

She looked out at the newly torn land.

“It’s hard to imagine an interstate behind your home with thousands of vehicles running past your home,” Jan said.

It would sit just about 250 feet from her back door. Cars would move quickly through the Boyds’ former land as they speed off to their desired destinations — their presence fleeting. Bill and Jan would look on from the house that predates the invention of the automobile. They’d watch the interstate rainwater runoff trickle down into their lands. They’d see the lights illuminate the nearby sky.

Out in the country free of nosey neighbors and prying eyes, Jan leaves her drapes open. She hikes her land alone, lost in the cadence of her walk and the subtle sounds of cooing birds and scurrying chipmunks. Jan feels safe on her land.

If all goes according to the state’s plan, the interstate will run through the northern quarter of the Boyds’ land. Looking out the back window of the Civil War-era home, they will be able to see the concrete hulk.

“I don’t know if I could live here anymore.”

* * *

Bill and Jan aren’t alone in losing property to I-69. Hundreds of homeowners sold land or even moved from their homes entirely when INDOT came knocking. The multi-billion dollar construction project threw money at those in its way to clear the path in the name of economic prosperity and increased safety the road could bring.

Will Wingfield of the INDOT Office of Communications said the project’s power to strengthen the state is key to understanding its necessity.

“The most important reason for the project, more than many others, are the connections from an entire region of our state with jobs and health care that other portions of the state can benefit from,” Wingfield said.

The Boyds aren’t convinced, and neither is Sandra Tokarski of Citizens for Appropriate Rural Roads, a grassroots organization that aims to preserve the rural character of the southern Indiana region. It’s one of the parties in a federal lawsuit against the state about I-69 construction.  

“You could probably do a better job tossing $100 bills out of an airplane in terms of really helping the people of Indiana,” said Tokarski, whose Bloomington property is also involved in property condemnation.

CARR believes the I-69 project is not just financially irresponsible, but also will be environmentally detrimental to the unity of small, rural communities.

“This project is wrong for the state,” Tokarski said. “It has been and continues to be. Yes, we acknowledge we’ve lost Sections 1 through 3. It’s a tragedy. The damage to homes and farms and families cannot be repaired.”

The state focuses on what will come and not what the everyman will lose, the Boyds said.

Wingfield said INDOT’s goal has always been to amicably purchase land from landowners, when possible. Out of more than 1,000 parcels, just 167 went to condemnation court, Wingfield said, Boyds included.

“We’re labeled as difficult,” Bill said. The two laughed, but it’s true, they said.

“They probably have other names for us, but ...” he added. “It’s a politically driven process. It always has been. That’s what we’re up against.”

With the joint federal lawsuit still in the works, the Boyds aren’t going away silently anytime soon.

* * *

Unlike in previous sections, INDOT officials approached landowners through “kitchen table meetings,” during which they explained the land acquisition process, often in the very homes to be demolished. Wingfield said 94 percent of impacted property owners in Section 4 agreed to this style of negotiations.

Like others in the path of the construction who refused the kitchen table meetings, the Boyds’ land was first appraised. The Boyds were made an offer of $51,700 in April 2011. Early acquisition, the state called it. They refused the offer, uninterested in selling. Moreover, they felt it was too low an assessment and left out the worth of certain structures on the property. They could have accepted that offer. It all could have ended there with the Boyds signing some paperwork and walking away with green-lined pockets.

But it didn’t.

As fall began to chill the land, a different type of coolness hit the Boyds. A letter of condemnation that essentially transferred possession of the land from the family to the state arrived without warning, the Boyds said. They were losing their land to construction whether they liked it or not.

Wingfield said he cannot comment on the Boyds, as their multiple lawsuits are still pending.

“What’s unique about the Boyds is how hard they continue to work to expose that the state has done wrong of which there are many,” Tokarski said.

It’s not about the money, Bill and Jan said. It’s about standing for the principles they believe the state has sidestepped.

Jan crossed her arms as she spoke of the process.

“I just feel that nobody holds them accountable.”

* * *

She remembers following her grandmother outside, basket in hand. Jan was young, in elementary school, but she was old enough to help her grandparents on her spring break.

The two would walk down to the brooder house to fetch warm eggs. Basket nearby, Jan would reach beneath the feathery hens and remove the fresh eggs. Sometimes, she would follow her grandmother over to the tractor shed and find runaway hens squatting over more eggs to collect.

To Jan, her youth is a collage of farm life with her grandparents. She still feels the cool of the stainless steel milk cartons she’d use when she helped her grandfather milk the cows. Potatoes needed hulling from the potato patch. Water from the spring needed to be drawn and was often done so by her grandmother with a pail in each hand. Grandpa would boil that water to cook the hogs he would shoot and dress, right in front of Jan.

On weekends, he’d take out his new turquoise 1958 Chevrolet Bel Air and drive the family into town for the weekly grocery store visit. She’d often go with him when he took his pickup truck into Bloomfield to have his corn ground into feed.

After buying the property in 1919, her grandparents slowly moved to a life of agriculture. By the 40s, her grandfather had established a functioning farm, complete with chickens, hogs and dairy cattle. He rotated a variety of crops, from corn to tomatoes, even tobacco. He also built a number of oaken structures on the land, including two that were recently demolished.

“They have, you know, memories to us, to me,” Jan said. “I was here on this farm. I’ve been here off and on, here all my life.”

Bill entered the picture years later and first visited the farm when he was dating Jan. As grandpa began to age and became less able to cut his grass with his sickle bar mower on his John Deere tractor, he taught Bill his ways.

“Bill was a city boy,” Jan said. “He didn’t know anything about a tractor. But he learned and ended up doing a lot of it for my grandfather. I suppose that’s where his attachment to the land really began.”

She and her husband lived, worked and raised their children in Indianapolis. Bloomfield was a weekend escape. It was a place to visit her aging grandparents and revisit her own childhood. It was a vision of a quiet retirement, surrounded in wooded, pastured beauty. It was, and is, a stronghold of family.

“It was so easy before. It was just so laid back and easy,” Jan says. “Now they’ve made it so difficult.”

* * *

Jan was notified in late September 2012 that crews would come soon to demolish the four structures that stood in the way of the construction. There was an equipment shed that Bill and his son built by hand and an old hog house her grandfather built in the 40s. Those and two smaller structures would soon disappear.

The Boyds ended their multi-month wait for a court of appeals verdict Oct. 11, 2012. In two sentences, they knew their fate. “None of the Boyds’ claims are reviewable in eminent domain proceedings. We therefore affirm the trial court.” That’s all Indiana Court of Appeals Senior Judge Randall Shepard wrote. They had lost.

Soon, contractors moved on the land and started drawing the line between the Boyds property and the state’s land in the form of the metal wire fence.

That land is still in the Boyds’ name. They took a final step of filing an appeal with the Indiana Supreme Court to see if the project could be stopped. After it was filed in November, all they had to do was wait.   

* * *

Again, the two walked their land, this time months later on a similarly warm April afternoon. Looking out into the distance, the Boyds can see the bloody afterbirth still swaying from the rear of one of their cows. She just gave birth that morning to a young black calf, which struggled to stay upright as it teetered in the greening field next to its mother and Cinderella, another black cow named by Bill and Jan’s grandchildren.

It marks the fifth birth of the spring season. With limited land last year, the Boyds thinned their herd. Jan hopes she won’t have to do it again this year.

“I still keep hoping we’re going to win,” she said. “I just think we’re in the right.”

After months of waiting, the Boyds’ attorney Rudolph Savich of Bloomington emailed the couple with the news the State Supreme Court would not hear their case. Savich said there are a few options for the future of the state case, but most are unlikely to produce different results. He does, however, see promise in the Boyds’ federal case.

“I think that the federal case raised some strong legal arguments,” he said. Though he added that common sense would suggest a judge ordering to tear down an existing highway isn’t the most likely option.

Jan and Bill say the defeat at the State Supreme Court level was unexpected, but that despite previous legal setbacks, they are optimistic about the federal court ruling.

“You always hope,” Jan added.

As Savich noted, their federal case could take months, or even years to reach a conclusion. In the meantime, they have new calves to name and work to do on their land.

“I’ve got to get it spruced back up again,” Jan said. Blue painter’s tape frames the doorways and windows of the little white house in anticipation of the second half of Jan’s paint job.

Bill has no plans to permanently join Jan “down-home.” The weekends are enough.

“It’s mentally challenging to want to do anything down here,” Bill said.

There’s a lot of buildings that need to be repaired and a lot of work that needs to be done, but I just don’t have the mental capability to do it anymore because of this up here,” he said, lifting his head toward the construction.

“It’s depressing. I don’t even want to be down here.”