Court Opinion

ID: 9551078
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-07 18:47:29.379343+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T15:23:02.571749
License: Public Domain

Mr. Chief Justice Frantz
dissenting:
The majority opinion illustrates what results from the narrow, circumscribed meaning given by this Court to the words “any person aggrieved,” appearing in the annexation statutes. A person may be aggrieved in the truest sense and yet be helpless to fend the action of an' annexing municipality under such narrow meaning. Such is the plight of Smith in this case.
Smith brought suit under C.R.S. ’53, 139-11-6, to contest the annexation on the ground that it was invalid. If the annexation is invalid and if Smith is an aggrieved person, he must initiate suit “within ninety days after the effective date of the approving ordinance.” (Id.) Failing to bring suit within the ninety-day period, Smith would be barred from contesting the annexation.
Should the municipality seek to annex Smith’s property, using the alleged invalidly' annexed property as the fulcrum for necessary contiguity of the Smith property, he may be in a position to attack both annexations, provided the municipality undertakes to annex Smith’s property before the ninety-day period has run on the first annexation.
The municipality need wait only until the expiration of the ninety-day period before it undertakes to annex Smith’s property which becomes continguous to the municipality by virtue of the alleged invalid annexation, but with which Smith then becomes trapped by the-narrow construction of what constitutes “any person aggrieved.” He is powerless to assert invalidity because he is by interpretation held to be a person not aggrieved, and after the .ninety days the annexation becomes incon-' testable. .. ’ . . '
*208By this process Smith’s property becomes contiguous, through an alleged invalid annexation, against which he can make no protest, and his property is subject to being attached to the city in a subsequent annexation.
I would hold Smith to be a “person aggrieved.” See my dissent in Denver v. Miller, 151 Colo. 444, 379 P. (2d) 169.