Who owns it?

June 15, 2010 5:31 PM

I can I determine who owns this island in the middle of a reservoir?

Is it as simple as the Registrar of Deeds? How would one go about determining an address?

posted by leotrotsky to Law & Government (11 answers total)

Response by poster: oh, ignore the address that appears to populate in the location field, that's irrelevant.
posted by leotrotsky at 5:32 PM on June 15, 2010

Well the city owns the entire Geist Reservoir as a water resource, so is there any reason to suspect they don't also own the island?
posted by jessamyn at 5:37 PM on June 15, 2010

Barring a simpler solution, you could probably shoot a call/e-mail to either your city councilperson, or to the appropriate city department (if you can guess it). They're usually pretty happy to answer this kind of trivia, since mostly only city officials care about it and it's kind-of fun when someone else does too. If they don't know, they almost always know who to ask to find out and can point you in the right direction.
posted by Eyebrows McGee at 5:42 PM on June 15, 2010 [1 favorite]

I always click this questions and they are always in New York or someplace. I had to reload the window to make sure there wasn't some sort of browser caching problem.

My go-to resource for these things is IndySiteFinder. The island doesn't show up and the reservoir is parcel 4013601. As jessamyn pointed out it is owned by the city of Indianapolis.

I hope you are asking this question because you are making plans to live there for the summer. That would be awesome and I think you should go for it.
posted by ChrisHartley at 6:05 PM on June 15, 2010

This property tax viewer from the Marion County Assessor's Office shows "Marina Ltd Partnership" as the owner. Presumably this company?
posted by gueneverey at 6:07 PM on June 15, 2010

Response by poster: I would actually love to live in a little cabin on this island, like a tumbleweed tiny house. The two tricks would be fresh water and sewage. I'm just curious as to what the logistics of buying, building or renting would be.
posted by leotrotsky at 6:10 PM on June 15, 2010

Well, it's in Geist and as gueneverey found, apparently owned by developers (the smaller island to the west is parcel #4022908 and is owned by the city). You'll need a lot of money and even then there is no way you would be able to get zoning approval (unless you have *a lot* of money). You might be able to do it Huck Finn style but you would be better off not in the middle of a houdy-toudy suburb where people will freak out about their property values There are some small isolated islands/sandbars in the White River or even Fall Creek that also offer possibilities for Huck Finn adventures.
posted by ChrisHartley at 6:21 PM on June 15, 2010

The two tricks would be fresh water and sewage.

Dude, it's in the middle of a reservoir. If fresh water would be a trick you really need to talk to your city fathers.
posted by Nothing... and like it at 8:02 PM on June 15, 2010

The larger island is indeed owned by the Marina Limited Partnership and is parcel number 4022907. Its most recent assessed value was $741,000, so I highly doubt this is the sort of place you can just set up camp on without someone noticing fairly quickly. I also doubt you could afford to buy it. Taxes on the property are approximately $8400 a year.

I highly doubt Marina is interested in selling. I mean, look at this place. These people probably like the fact that there's a pretty, uninhabited, tree-covered island in their reservoir, and the most effective method of land use control is buying the land and doing nothing with it. What you cannot prevent by legislation or litigation you can prevent by ownership. It's zoned commercial too, meaning you wouldn't be allowed to live there even if you owned it unless you got the city to change the zoning, and, well, good luck with that one.

A cool idea which is unfortunately incompatible with the realities of modern life.
posted by valkyryn at 6:06 AM on June 16, 2010

This YouTube video features a guy named Allen Rosenberg talking about that island. Towards the end it seems clear that he either owns or controls the entity that owns the island. The video was posted in 2009 and he's talking about 2 million as an asking price.

Marina Limited Partnership, which was confirmed as the owner above, has an executive named Allen Rosenberg from Indianapolis, IN (I got that from a political contribution tracking website, the first thing that came up on google).
posted by NormieP at 5:09 PM on June 16, 2010

Careful even poking around, because some places freak out about people swimming or boating in reservoirs -- but then other reservoirs are used as recreational lakes, so go figure.
posted by dhartung at 11:24 PM on June 16, 2010