Margaret L. Pulera v. Jeffrey Karbash

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. F ED. R. A PP . P. 34(a)(2)(C).
NONPRECEDENTIAL DISPOSITION
To be cited only in accordance with F ED. R. APP . P. 32.1

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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 . S TAT. §§ 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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No. 24-2126 Page 3
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 state-
court 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 W IS . S TAT. § 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 . S TAT. § 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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