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Nature of Suit Code: 440
Nature of Suit: Other Civil Rights
Cause of Action: 

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United States Court of Appeals

For the Seventh Circuit

Chicago, Illinois 60604

Submitted December 18, 2024*

Decided December 19, 2024 

Before

ILANA DIAMOND ROVNER, Circuit Judge

DORIS L. PRYOR, Circuit Judge

NANCY L. MALDONADO, Circuit Judge

No. 24-2126 

MARGARET L. PULERA,

Plaintiff-Appellant, 

v. 

JEFFREY KARBASH, et al., 

Defendants-Appellees.

Appeal from the United States District 

Court for the Eastern District of 

Wisconsin. 

No. 23-cv-1211-pp

Pamela Pepper, 

 Chief Judge. 

O R D E R

Margaret Pulera sued four former members of the Town Board of Richmond in 

Walworth County, Wisconsin, alleging that they violated her due process rights by 

retroactively approving alterations to two roads near the county line. The district court 

* We have agreed to decide the case without oral argument because the briefs and 

record adequately present the facts and legal arguments, and oral argument would not 

significantly aid the court. FED. R. APP. P. 34(a)(2)(C).

NONPRECEDENTIAL DISPOSITION

To be cited only in accordance with FED. R. APP. P. 32.1

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No. 24-2126 Page 2 

granted the defendants’ motion for summary judgment, concluding that Pulera’s claim 

was barred by the statute of limitations. We affirm.

In July 2013, the Rock County Highway Department made alterations to two 

roads located at the county line between Rock and Walworth Counties. These 

alterations, according to Pulera, have produced a dangerous situation by creating a 

sharp curve with reduced visibility on the county highway. At a September 2014 joint 

hearing, the Boards of the towns of Johnstown (in Rock County) and Richmond voted to 

approve the road alterations retroactively. Pulera attended the hearing.

Around the same time, Pulera had initiated a flurry of litigation related to the 

road alterations. In July 2014, she filed a federal lawsuit alleging that the Rock County 

Director of Public Works violated her constitutional rights by championing the road 

project. The district court dismissed Pulera’s case for lack of federal jurisdiction, and we 

agreed that Pulera’s claim arose under state law. In state court, in November and 

December 2014, Pulera filed two petitions asserting that the town boards’ retroactive

approvals of the road alterations disregarded state procedures for changing town 

highways, see WIS. STAT. §§ 82.10, 82.21, which she contends can be applied only 

prospectively. After lengthy litigation, during which the Wisconsin Court of Appeals

consolidated the two actions, the Walworth County Circuit Court ultimately dismissed 

Pulera’s case on the merits. Pulera appealed, and the Wisconsin Court of Appeals 

summarily affirmed the dismissal of the consolidated case, concluding that the boards 

did not act contrary to law or in an arbitrary, oppressive, or unreasonable manner by 

retroactively approving completed road work. The Wisconsin Supreme Court denied 

Pulera’s petition for review in September 2020. 

Nearly three years later, Pulera filed this federal lawsuit, asserting that four 

individual defendants, all of whom are current or former members of the Town Board 

of Richmond, violated her right of due process under the Fourteenth Amendment by 

retroactively approving the road alterations while purposefully ignoring and excluding 

Pulera from secret deliberations. See 42 U.S.C. § 1983.1 The defendants moved for 

summary judgment, arguing, among other things, that the claim was time-barred. 

1 Pulera insists that she has not brought her claim under § 1983, but as the 

district court correctly pointed out to her at the summary judgment hearing, the only 

avenue for non-prisoner plaintiffs to bring a constitutional claim against public officers

is through § 1983. See, e.g., Weinmann v. McClone, 787 F.3d 444, 447 (7th Cir. 2015). Pulera 

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 The district court held a hearing on the defendants’ motion and granted it orally. 

The court concluded that Pulera’s claim accrued—at the latest—in November 2014, 

because by then she had the necessary facts to assert her claim, as shown by her statecourt lawsuit challenging the Richmond Board’s actions. Thus, this federal suit, brought 

nearly nine years later, was untimely.

On appeal, Pulera argues that the claim is not time-barred because she had to 

exhaust her state-law remedies before pursuing a federal claim. She contends that the 

limitations period started running on the day the Wisconsin Supreme Court denied 

review of her state-court case, and therefore her current claim is timely. We review de 

novo a district court’s decision to grant summary judgment based on a statute of 

limitations. CMFG Life Ins. Co. v. RBS Sec., Inc., 799 F.3d 729, 735 (7th Cir. 2015). 

State law determines the applicable statute of limitations for a § 1983 claim.

See Wallace v. Kato, 549 U.S. 384, 387 (2007); Milchtein v. Milwaukee Cnty., 42 F.4th 814, 

822 (7th Cir. 2022). Under Wisconsin law, Pulera had six years to bring her suit once her 

claim accrued. See Milchtein, 42 F.4th at 822 (citing WIS. STAT. § 893.53 (2015)).2 Federal 

law determines when a § 1983 claim accrues. See Wallace, 549 U.S. at 388. The limitations 

period thus begins to run “when the plaintiff knows or should know that his or her 

constitutional rights have been violated.” Milchtein, 42 F.4th at 822 (citation omitted). 

Pulera’s claim is untimely. She knew of the purported violation of her rights 

when she filed her state-law petitions in November and December 2014. The allegations 

has been clear that her claim “was filed under the Fourteenth Amendment, Section 1,” 

and she must use § 1983 as a vehicle for that claim. 

2 The defendants argue for the first time on appeal that a three-year limitations 

period applies because Pulera sued after the statute was amended in 2018 to shorten the 

period from six to three years. See WIS. STAT. § 893.53 (2018). But the “older version of 

the statute applies” because the cause of action accrued before the effective date of the 

amendment. Milchtein, 42 F.4th at 822 n.2; see Gutter v. Seamandel, 308 N.W.2d 403, 411 

(Wis. 1981) (“[I]n the absence of express language in a statute which imposes a new 

statute of limitations stating that the statute has retroactive effect and in the absence of 

any legislative intent that a new statute of limitations be applied retroactively to a cause 

of action that accrued prior to the effective date of the statute, this court would not 

apply the new statute of limitations to causes of action accruing prior to the effective 

date of the statute.”).

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underlying her constitutional claim—that the town boards harmed her by applying 

Wisconsin law retroactively to approve road alterations that had already been 

completed—are unchanged from the allegations that supported her first federal lawsuit 

and the consolidated state cases. And whether she knew of a particular legal theory at 

the time is immaterial; only the plaintiff’s knowledge of her injury matters. See Tobey v. 

Chibucos, 890 F.3d 634, 645–46 (7th Cir. 2018). The limitations period for her § 1983 claim 

therefore expired in November 2020, several years before she initiated this litigation. 

And despite Pulera’s unsupported assertion that the limitations period was tolled until 

a final judgment in the state-court case (i.e., when the Wisconsin Supreme Court denied 

her petition for review), “exhaustion of state remedies is not a prerequisite to an action 

under 42 U.S.C. § 1983.” Knick v. Twp. of Scott, 588 U.S. 180, 185 (2019) (cleaned up).

AFFIRMED

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