The offer is on a prescribed form
Indiana does not require a pre-offer appraisal. The effort to purchase must include establishing a proposed purchase price, conducting good faith negotiations, and giving the owner an appraisal or other evidence used to establish that price.
What is prescribed is the offer itself. IC 32-24-1-5(c) sets out a mandatory form, the Uniform Property or Easement Acquisition Offer, and the offer must be served personally or by certified mail at least 30 days before a complaint is filed. If service fails, notice may be published twice, the second publication at least 7 and not more than 21 days after the first.
- IC 32-24-1-3(c)
- IC 32-24-1-5(a), (b), (c)
Easement scope now has to match the pleaded need
On April 20, 2026 the Court of Appeals of Indiana decided two cases the same day, both reversing, both against the same condemnor.
In each, the complaint established a need for a water line, but the easement description swept in rights related to sanitary sewer, gas, and other regulated utility service. The court held that the condemnor failed to establish a need for those additional uses, that the trial court should have sustained the landowners' objections to the scope of the easement sought, and it reversed the orders of appropriation that followed from overruling them.
The operative phrase is that the easement description exceeded the pleaded need by incorporating rights for which the condemnor alleged no present or prospective need. Practically, one generic easement template can no longer run across a whole project. Each take has to be scoped to, and documented against, the need actually pleaded.
- Lingle v. Citizens Water of Westfield, LLC, No. 25A-PL-1898 (Ind. Ct. App. Apr. 20, 2026)
- Bahler v. Citizens Water of Westfield, LLC, No. 25A-PL-1922 (Ind. Ct. App. Apr. 20, 2026)
- IC 32-24-1-8(a)(2)
A new notice step for municipal water and wastewater extensions
Senate Enrolled Act 6, Public Law 65, was signed on March 4, 2026. Before a municipally owned utility may condemn land to extend a water or wastewater main located outside the municipality's corporate boundaries or the utility's existing service territory, it must give written notice by mail to every landowner whose land is needed and to the county plan commission, and post project information on its own website while the county posts it on the county's.
A landowner or plan commission that receives one of those notices may request a meeting in writing within 30 days, and the utility must then offer to meet within 30 days of receiving the request. That is a new step in front of a process that already carried a 30-day floor before a complaint could be filed.
- Ind. P.L. 65-2026 (SEA 6), signed March 4, 2026