By Rusty Nixon Correspondent
PLYMOUTH — Circuit Court Judge Curt Palmer has ruled against Marshall County in a long-running law suit over road work.
“The suit has been going on for several years now; they (the plaintiffs) did a lot of discovery work,” said Marshall County Attorney Jim Clevenger. “When it started, I informed the Commissioners that the way the statute was written, there was the strong possibility that the judge could rule against us. This ruling really isn’t a shock to us.”

Palmer ruled in favor of Wayne Lamberson and International Union of Operating Engineers Local 150 against Marshall County.
The case was originally brought against the county by a Marshall county taxpayer who was a member of the union.
The point of contention centered on the state Public Works Statute which states that all county projects of over $100,000 in value must be bid. From 2003 until 2005 the county had undertaken considerable street repaving projects, notably Michigan Road north and south and Lincoln Highway from east to west.
“The amount of asphalt the county purchased did exceed $100,000,” said Clevenger. “The contention of the Commissioners at that time was that they routinely conducted road patching projects and these projects were just maintenance of a current road, they weren’t constructing a new road or changing an existing road they were merely putting on a new layer of asphalt.”
The contention of Marshall County was that the state allows counties to use qualified workers to perform such projects. They had the equipment and the workers to do so, and therefore were simply conducting business as usual. Judge Palmer did not agree.
“Judge Palmer felt the language of the statute was pretty clear,” said Clevenger.
In a news release to the Pilot News, Libertarian Party of Indiana’s Ryan Liedtky stated Tuesday that he believes Judge Palmer made the correct ruling. 
“The law is quite clear.  Judge Palmer was absolutely correct,” said Liedtky who went on to say that he questions the union’s intent, but agrees the lawsuit was valid. “The union is not wrong for doing this, but they always had the option not to file, and to maybe work with the commissioners to ensure that in the future projects were open to bidding.  That would have saved us all a lot of money.” 
 “We felt that the law as its written really gives somewhat of an unfair advantage to private contractors,” said Clevenger. “Obviously the Commissioners were just trying to get the largest amount of road repaved at the largest tax savings. Since this began we’ve been in touch with our state senator (Ed Charbonneau) to see if we can at least get the dollar cap in the statute raised. He hasn’t been able to get a lot of interest in that in Indianapolis.”
 “I understand the intent of this law, but I don’t like it,” Liedtky concurred. “The county Commissioners and Council members should have the ability to calculate in the cost of paying county workers who will not be working on the projects and then determining if it will be better to open the floor to contract bidding or not.  We can work together to come up with a better solution than this, I'm sure.”
“We tried to explain to the judge that we hoped that we wouldn’t have to cut county employees in the summer time,” said Clevenger. “Since we’ll have to hire out work that they could be doing, that’s a distinct possibility. We’ll also have to keep close watch on our repaving projects to be totally sure they don’t exceed $100,000.”
“We’ll discuss this in executive session but I’m not sure we’ll file any other actions or appeals on this. At this point our time might be better served by trying to get in touch with as many legislators as we can to see if we can do something about the statute itself.”