by Andrew Maciejewski – amaciejewski@h-ponline.com
A lawsuit filed by the Huntington County Community School Corporation (HCCSC) aims to strip the Kriegbaum Estate heirs and restrictions limiting the corporation’s use of the property from the original deed, according to court records.
HCCSC previously discussed moving the football field across Jefferson Street and onto school grounds, as part of their discussion in 2018 to seek $90 million of improvements to Huntington North High School.
The lawsuit comes after an heir to the Kriegbaum Estate, 81-year-old John Kriegbaum, addressed the school board of trustees at their Jan. 14 meeting disputing HCCSC’s plans to quiet the title of the property. He requested that the corporation respect his grandfather’s wishes for the property, since he said his grandfather only donated the property to increase athletics in Huntington, and he said he felt corporation was quieting the title since the property’s value has increased due to the development of the area near U.S. 24.
The total assessed valuation for the property is more than $650,000, according to Government Information Systems (GIS) reports.
During a meeting in January 2018, HCCSC Superintendent Randy Harris said he believes the limits of the original deed no longer apply.
“There’s the urban legend out there that if the school district chooses to do anything with that property other than to use it for athletics that it would revert back to the Kriegbaums,” Harris previously said. “We believe that all of that time has passed and that we indeed do have the authority to do – dispose of the property in any way that we should choose, but this resolves the matter before we would ever get to the point of having to clean it up.”
On August 1, 1927, John Philip Kriegbaum and his wife, Anna Smith Kriegbaum, donated the property now known as Kriegbaum Field to the “public schools of the City of Huntington” under the express conditions that the property be used as an athletic field, no professional sports be played there and no games take place on Sundays, according to the deed. The deed states that if the rules aren’t followed, the property is to be reverted to the Kriegbaum’s or their heirs.
In HCCSC’s complaint, the corporation claims that, to its knowledge, John Philip Kriegbaum, his wife and his sons and daughters are all dead.
HCCSC also asserts that since the public schools within Huntington County consolidated, HCCSC has broken restrictions set forth in the deed for more than 50 years, since the field now serves the entire county and not just “public schools of the City of Huntington” and non-athletic events, according to the complaint.
The complaint claims that the Kriegbaums and their heirs knew about the violations of the deed and had opportunities to revert the deed to the Kriegbaum Estate but failed to take legal action.
The corporation contends that the school has fulfilled the conditions of the deed, since the property has been used as a school athletic field for more than 90 years, adding that “the title should now be vested solely in HCCSC,” the complaint states.
In the 1960s when Huntington County began consolidating the schools within Huntington County, the complaint filed states that the School Consolidation Act of 1959 provided that “all property rights and assets of existing school corporations became automatically vested in the reorganized school corporation,” which is HSSCS and not the city public school system as stated on the deed.
In 1968, Kriegbaum Field was transferred to “become the sole and absolute property of the Huntington County Community School Corporation” and was “transferred to the name of (HCCSC),” and the complaint says that the transfer was a “technical breach of the Deed’s condition” but no legal action from the Kriegbaum Estate was initiated.
The complaint also cites a portion of Indiana Code that limits the ability of someone recovering property after June 30, 1994 for breaches of conditions that occurred before July 1, 1993. HCCSC claims that the specific clause bars the Kriegbaum Estate from seeking legal action to revert the title into their sole ownership.