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Fort Scott, Government, Health Care

Fort Scott’s dialysis clinic: Reopening is still in the works

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Late in 2025 the Fort Scott City Commission approved a property tax break of up to ten years for the vacant dialysis clinic at 2526 S. Main, to help a Joplin kidney specialist reopen it. Fort Scott has had no dialysis center since 2019. Patients drive to Pittsburg or Chanute, three times a week.

This week, FortScott.biz checked with those involved. City officials say their part is finished. The commission awarded the abatement, the bond paperwork is complete, and nothing more is pending at City Hall. The reopening is now in the hands of the physician who will run the clinic.

The building itself is quiet for now. A July 25 visit found no signage or activity yet, and county records show the property’s 2025 tax bill of $65,343.80 was paid in full. That fits the timeline in the city’s documents, which say the exemption cannot appear before the 2026 tax statement.

Where the building is

Most people know it as the low brick building in front of Walmart.

Map showing 2526 S. Main between the Walmart Supercenter parking lot and South Main Street in Fort Scott
2526 S. Main sits between the Walmart Supercenter parking lot and South Main Street (US 69/K-7). Map data © OpenStreetMap contributors.
The entrance canopy at 2526 S. Main with the Fort Scott Walmart Supercenter behind it
The building sits directly in front of the Walmart Supercenter, visible in the background. FortScott.biz photo, July 25, 2026.

 

Bourbon County’s tax record for the parcel (tax ID 002-FS10762B, in the Wal-Mart Plaza Pointe subdivision) answers the abatement question directly.

The building did change hands. The county lists Moka Rentals LLC as the current owner and taxpayer of record. That is the company named in the city’s bond documents as the tenant. Before Moka, the record shows Phoenix Fort Scott LLC, and before that Wal-Mart Stores and Wellington Ft Scott Ltd.

The 2025 taxes were paid in full, with no exemption. For tax year 2025 the county appraised the property at $1,400,000 ($193,790 in land, $1,206,210 in building) for an assessed value of $350,001. At a mill levy of 186.696 that produced a bill of $65,343.80, paid on December 18, 2025.

Tax year Owner of record Assessed value Total tax
2025 Moka Rentals LLC $350,001 $65,343.80
2024 Phoenix Fort Scott LLC $377,331 $72,397.38
2023 Phoenix Fort Scott LLC $422,346 $80,914.32
2022 Phoenix Fort Scott LLC $413,983 $79,080.28
2021 Phoenix Fort Scott LLC $395,233 $78,653.34
2020 Phoenix Fort Scott LLC $389,186 $77,981.20
2019 Phoenix Fort Scott LLC $396,485 $80,160.54

So when does the abatement take effect? By the terms of the city’s own documents, the earliest it can apply is tax year 2026. Both the resolution and the ordinance say the exemption runs for ten years “commencing in the calendar year following the calendar year in which the Bonds are issued.” The draft bond documents date the bonds December 23, 2025. If they were issued on schedule, the first year the exemption could show up on a tax bill is 2026. Kansas tax statements for 2026 don’t go out until November.

That makes this November’s statement for 2526 S. Main the first place the exemption can appear in the public record.

The county’s appraisal record still lists the structure under its old name, “Fresenius Medical Care Dialysis,” a 7,992-square-foot medical office building put up in 2014.

The deal ran through taxable industrial revenue bonds. Despite the name, the city borrows nothing and owes nothing; it acts as a pass-through so a private project can reach two state-level tax breaks, a property-tax exemption and a sales-tax exemption on construction.

On November 18, 2025, after a public hearing, the commission voted 5-0 to move forward with Resolution 40-2025, declaring it advisable to issue about $800,000 in bonds to acquire, renovate, furnish and equip the building and lease it to Moka Rentals LLC (resolution; minutes).

Dr. Nadine Aboul-Magd, a kidney specialist with Joplin Nephrology Consultants who the minutes say served Fort Scott from 2015 to 2019, told the commission the abatement was essential to the project. The minutes record her saying the reopened clinic would employ at least seven people initially and would add two kidney physicians (minutes).

Steve Robb of Municipal Consulting LLC, who prepared the cost-benefit study Kansas requires before a city grants this kind of exemption, told commissioners the deal would return $9.67 for every dollar the city gave up, well above the 1.3 he called the cutoff for a worthwhile deal, mostly because a dialysis clinic uses a great deal of city water (minutes).

On December 16, 2025, the commission took up Ordinance No. 3792, which authorizes the bonds (ordinance). “There were no changes from what was discussed,” Mayor Tim Van Hoecke said as he introduced it (video, 2:07:39). A staff member called it “just procedural.” The commission voted and the mayor moved on. The city has not posted approved minutes for that meeting, so the exact tally is not on the public record.

Two details in the paperwork are worth knowing:

  • The break covers the bond-funded share of the property. The exemption applies only to the part of the property paid for with bond money, and it must be applied for. The one levy it cannot touch is the school district’s capital outlay levy, under the statute the resolution cites, K.S.A. 72-53,113 (resolution, § 4). For USD 234 that levy is 7.998 mills (about 4.3% of the 186.696 total on this parcel). Everything else can be abated, including Bourbon County’s share. This parcel sits in tax unit 002, which is made up of the state, Bourbon County, Fort Scott Community College, the city of Fort Scott, USD 234 and the Southwind Extension District (2025 Bourbon County levy sheet). The minutes record the city’s consultant telling commissioners that most taxing entities come out ahead, with minimal impact on the extension district and the community college (minutes).
  • The break is tied to actually running a dialysis center. The lease says that “[s]ubject to the Project being continually operated as a dialysis center,” the city will make the filings needed to keep the exemption alive for the full ten years (project lease, § 7.4).

What the city, the county and the doctor’s office said this week

On July 29, Mary Wyatt, Fort Scott’s Planning, Housing and Business Development Director, told FortScott.biz the city’s part of the deal is done. The commission voted to award the ten-year abatement, and the paperwork between the city’s bond counsel and the owner has been completed. “It’s all in the hands of the owner at this point,” she said. “The ball is just in their court to get their operations up and running.”

Wyatt said she had not heard from the owner recently. In their last conversation, she said, the owner told her that opening a dialysis clinic is a legally involved process, lining up physicians in particular, and that she wants to go about it carefully, given the building’s history of closing.

Bourbon County Appraiser Matt Quick confirmed that no exemption yet appears in county records. Once the remaining paperwork is complete, he said, the property goes into exempt status for ten years. Quick described the city as the lead on the bond arrangement.

Wyatt said the approval that mattered came from the city commission, because the city is the entity abating the taxes locally. The state’s remaining role, as she described it, is a document that “has to be acknowledged at the state level.”

Quick also sent FortScott.biz pages from the state Division of Property Valuation’s guide to these exemptions, which fills in the steps between the city’s vote and a smaller tax bill. After the bonds are issued, the applicant files an exemption application, called the IRBX form, with the county appraiser, who forwards it with comments to the Board of Tax Appeals. The exemption is deemed approved unless the board schedules a hearing within 30 days of receiving all the information. The break is not automatic once granted. The owner must file a claim with the county appraiser by March 1 each year of the ten; miss the filing, and the property goes back on the tax roll. Those filings square with what the city describes. Under the lease, keeping the exemption in place is tied to the building operating as a dialysis center.

At Joplin Nephrology Consultants, practice manager Heather said there are “no updates as of right now” on the Fort Scott clinic, which she described as Dr. Nadine’s project, and confirmed the reopening is still in the plans.

What the building looks like now

The vacant former dialysis building at 2526 S. Main, Fort Scott, with an empty parking lot
2526 S. Main on the afternoon of July 25, 2026. FortScott.biz photo.
The covered patient drop-off entrance at 2526 S. Main, with no signage on the building
The covered patient drop-off at the entrance. There is no signage on the building. FortScott.biz photo, July 25, 2026.

The lot was empty on the afternoon of July 25. There is no signage on the building or at the street, the blinds are drawn, and the covered patient drop-off, the giveaway that the place was built as a clinic, sits unused.

Fort Scott has been losing health care since 2018. Mercy announced that October that it would close the hospital it had run in town since 1886 (FortScott.biz, Oct. 3, 2018). The dialysis center closed the following September. Fresenius did not publicly give a reason for the closure. “I have talked to Fresenius,” then-City Manager Dave Martin said at the time. “They haven’t made money to the point of, they can’t stay open” (FortScott.biz, Aug. 30, 2019). Ascension Via Christi closed the emergency department in December 2023 (FortScott.biz, Dec. 18, 2023). Freeman has been working toward a hospital and emergency department here (FortScott.biz, Jan. 8, 2025).

The building has been empty since Fresenius Medical Care closed it on Sept. 30, 2019. As late as May 2023, its owner at the time said it was still looking for a tenant (FortScott.biz, May 2, 2023).

If the project comes together, that vacancy — and the three-times-a-week drives to Pittsburg or Chanute — would end.

Sources: Bourbon County tax and appraisal records for parcel 002-FS10762B, retrieved July 25, 2026; City of Fort Scott agenda packets and minutes for Nov. 18 and Dec. 16, 2025; city meeting recordings for Nov. 18 and Dec. 16, 2025. Notices ran in the Fort Scott Tribune on Nov. 8 and Dec. 20, 2025. Telephone interviews July 29, 2026, with Bourbon County Appraiser Matt Quick, Fort Scott Planning, Housing and Business Development Director Mary Wyatt, and Joplin Nephrology Consultants; pages from the Kansas Division of Property Valuation’s property-tax exemption guide provided by the appraiser’s office. Photos and map by FortScott.biz; map data © OpenStreetMap contributors.

Business, Fort Scott, Government

City manager: rail spur into the industrial park ‘sounds very possible’

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Fort Scott City Manager Brad Matkin told city commissioners on Tuesday, July 21, that he has finally found someone at the railroad willing to talk about running a rail spur into the city’s industrial park — and that the railroad is willing to bring one in.

Nothing has been agreed to, and nobody has voted on anything. But the report was the most concrete public word yet on infrastructure that would shape what kind of employers Fort Scott can try to attract.

“I finally found somebody from the railroad that wants to talk, and it happens to be an economic development person for the railroad,” Matkin said. After a meeting the previous Friday, he said, “they are willing to bring a spur up right now up to the south of Timken, actually south of Valu.”

“It sounds very possible that we will be getting a railroad spur out to Industrial Park,” he said. “And manufacturing background can tell you how big that is.” He called it “huge for economic development in the future, because not that many industries have spurs going behind them.”

Satellite view of the Fort Scott Industrial Park with the BNSF railroad running north to south along the east edge
The BNSF main line runs north–south just east of the former Timken Belts plant on Campbell Drive. Matkin says the railroad is willing to bring a spur up to the south of the building. Satellite imagery ©2026 Google; annotation by FortScott.biz.

Matkin said they were meeting again that Friday and would “continue meeting until we get this thing ironed out.” He said the railroad “has been listening. They’ve been cooperative. They want the business, of course.”

The railroad wants to tie the spur into a Columbus, Kansas, line rather than a Springfield, Missouri, line, Matkin said, adding that he could not explain the reasoning. Public rail maps show two BNSF lines meeting just south of the industrial park — one running southeast toward Springfield, the other southwest through Columbus.

Two-panel map showing the BNSF Fort Scott Subdivision and Afton Subdivision meeting just south of the Fort Scott Industrial Park
Two BNSF lines meet just south of the Fort Scott Industrial Park — one running southeast toward Springfield, Mo., the other southwest through Columbus, Kan. Map data © OpenStreetMap contributors (ODbL).

Matkin’s own ask is that the track not stop short. Running it behind the Timken building, he said, would let more than one company use it: that “would give a runway through their parking lot that you could bring from other companies to that spur.”

That is the case for rail access. A spur ties a plant to the main line, and for a manufacturer that ships heavy or bulk freight, having or sharing one is often what decides whether a site gets a serious look. The company buying the Timken building has raised it with him directly, Matkin said: “They’ve been talking to me about the railroad spur. That’s very important to them.”

The Timken building is why the timing matters. Timken announced in November 2023 that it would wind down its belts plant at 4505 Campbell Road and close it in 2025; about 155 people worked there. On the city’s radio show on July 16, Matkin said “the Timken building is sold. The contract is signed and everything,” with the buyer’s name and line of business expected “later in the month or first of August,” pending paperwork and financing. He has not named the buyer.

Next door, Diversey, the cleaning-products company that said in May it would put a blending plant and warehouse in the former Valu Merchandisers building, is already at work on its building, Matkin said, coordinating with the city’s fire department and engineer on code. Both buildings had been sitting empty. “These are big companies that are coming in,” he said.

A second rail item came up the same night on a different project: Commissioner Matthew Wells asked about the study the city is running with Fontana and Spring Hill through the firm Wilson & Company. That one is about crossings rather than spurs. Fort Scott, Spring Hill and Fontana share a $2.15 million BNSF planning grant, of which $800,000 covers the Fort Scott end of the work; the city put up $40,000 to match it. The study is meant to determine whether Fort Scott needs an overpass, Jayhawk Road is the hoped-for location, and which existing crossing BNSF would want closed in exchange. Matkin said it is underway, with the city’s business development director, Mary Wyatt, leading it.

Matkin’s report on the spur begins about 1:43:40 into the city’s video of the July 21 meeting.

Opinion

Opinion: Commissioners’ Responsibility to the Taxpayers – Mark Shead

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Four years ago Bourbon County handed over significant taxpayer resources to Legacy Healthcare Foundation. This donation was the former Mercy hospital campus and $2 million. The agreement included a list of conditions all designed to make sure the massive donation was used in ways that benefit the taxpayer and ensure that Bourbon County would continue to have access to healthcare.

Some of the requirements imposed on Legacy Healthcare Foundation in return for the donation:

  1. The $2 million can only be spent in three ways: building maintenance, operating costs including “development of an Acute Care Hospital,” and reduced rent for tenants providing “a legitimate community benefit.”
  2. Proof of backing at closing — either a Bourbon County property purchase over $300,000, or a line of credit secured by a lending institution for $2 million or more.
  3. Insurance naming the county — the recipient “shall have the Donor as a secondary insured” against wind, rain, tornado and fire.
  4. An EMS transaction by Jan. 1, 2023. This came with a firm date, and the donation agreement only says it would involve “an agreed upon subsidy”.
  5. Parcels can be transferred, but only where “the general purpose is for the development of these parcels for Bourbon County, Kansas.”

Whether the terms of the agreement have been met or not isn’t entirely clear. If $2 million was spent on building maintenance, it seems odd that the roof would be left to leak buckets of water every time it rains like some of the employees in the building claim is happening. Did Legacy spend the $2 million on maintenance and simply prioritize things other than the roof?

Several parcels have been transferred to Legacy Development Fort Scott Highway 69 Project, presumably meeting the terms of the agreement but that entity has unpaid taxes on that land clear back to 2023.

Since the agreement didn’t include any reporting requirement, it is up to the county commissioners to verify that the taxpayers are getting what they were promised in exchange for the building and cash.

If the terms aren’t met, the agreement gives the county one remedy: unwind the deal, take the property back, plus a refund of the cash donation that shrinks every year: $1 million, then $750,000, then $500,000. After the fifth year, in the agreement’s own words, “Donor will have no remedies.”

We are somewhere in year four. The agreement never says exactly when the clock started, but it becomes more urgent each day.

The commissioners owe it to the taxpayers to make sure this massive donation of taxpayer resources is not squandered. If the commissioners have all done their due diligence, looked into it, and believe the terms have all been met, then they need to state that plainly, show how all the terms have indeed been satisfied, and then move on to other matters. If Legacy hasn’t met the terms, then they need to make sure that the taxpayers don’t throw away what was originally a $45 million building project along with $2 million of cash and end up with a water-damaged, unmaintained building that has no hope of housing any of the healthcare services this county needs.

The worst thing the commissioners could do is to decide they can’t be bothered to see if the terms have been met until it is too late to do anything about it.

Mark Shead

Note: FortScott.biz publishes opinion pieces with a variety of perspectives. If you would like to share your opinion, please send a letter to [email protected].

Bourbon County

Fort Scott Commission Declines Continuum of Care Grant for Transitional Housing

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The Fort Scott City Commission voted 4–1 on July 13 to decline a Continuum of Care grant that would have had the city acquire and operate the former convent building as a transitional housing project.

The vote came during a continued special meeting, where the grant was the central agenda item. The proposal — known as BridgePoint Community — would have used federal Continuum of Care funding to renovate the building into a transitional housing facility for people experiencing homelessness.

City Manager Brad Matkin opened the discussion by reading a prepared statement opposing the plan. He said his objection was not to transitional housing itself, but to the city owning and operating such a facility: grant funding is temporary, he noted, while the long-term operating costs would ultimately fall on taxpayers. A qualified nonprofit, he argued, would be better positioned to run the program.

Commissioner Julie Buchta then moved to reject the grant. “Our first decision, in my opinion, is that we disapprove this consideration, continuum of care grant,” she said. Commissioner Tim Van Hoecke seconded, and the motion to reject the grant passed 4–1. Commissioner Matthew Wells cast the lone dissenting vote, saying that even if he had been inclined to vote yes, he had already been outvoted.

Commissioners said the proposal felt rushed, raised concerns about the building’s location near an elementary school and Gunn Park, and felt the scale of the project was too large for the city to take on.

An extended public comment period followed, with residents and operators of existing transitional-housing programs sharing their perspectives on homelessness in Fort Scott — including personal recovery stories and calls for the community to keep working on the issue through other approaches.

Bottom line: the grant will not move forward. The city will not submit the application to acquire and operate the convent building as a transitional housing project.

Special Meeting Agenda — July 13, 2026 (PDF)

Opinion

Opinion: There Can Be Another Western? – Mark Shead

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Nick Graham recently wrote that Bourbon County will never get another Western Insurance company. On first reading, I mentally nodded my head in agreement, but then paused. While on one level, he is right—the probability of a large insurance company wanting to come to Bourbon County and employ 1,000 people is extraordinarily close to zero—the actual history of the Western illustrates his point of the need for business investments and an environment that allows growth.

THE WESTERN INSURANCE COMPANIES PIONEER PROTECTION FORT SCOTT, KANSAS Trademark | TrademarkiaThe Western didn’t just “come to Fort Scott” and start employing a thousand people. The idea for what became The Western Automobile Indemnity Association was dreamed up in 1910 and it started business the next year. It survived the Great Depression due to careful financial management and grew into a holding company that owned a variety of businesses. By the 1950s a 20-year-old Warren Buffett discovered the company’s stock could be had for $16 a share, while it was producing profits of $20 per share. It became one of his earliest investments and a model for the type of value investing that grew his fortunes.

In 1967 the Western built what amounted to a tiny skyscraper downtown with an investment of over $11 million in today’s dollars because they were outgrowing the space they had in the Scottish Rite Temple building.

In 1981, the Tribune ran a story saying that the city had agreed to annex property south of Fort Scott where the Western planned to put an 80,000-square-foot building. This space would be used to house their computers and other offices. The city approved industrial revenue bonds of up to $22 million (in 2026 dollars). Since industrial bonds would make the building free from property taxes while the bonds were being repaid, the Western said they intended to make “payments in lieu of taxes.”

I remember being at the picnic on the grounds of that building after it was built. They had stocked the pond and I caught what, to an 8-year-old, seemed like the biggest catfish in the world. My father worked at the Western as a programmer and would occasionally get called in at night to fix an errant computer job that needed to get a clean run before the morning. I remember going with him, pulling up to the property gate in the dark and dealing with the security process to open the gate, walking from the parking lot to the door where more security verified we were supposed to be there and then entering the massive dark building. We made our way to the computer bunker where the bright lights made it feel like we had just stepped into daytime again. The room had a raised floor that hid miles of cable and pushed the constantly running air-conditioning into the giant computers. The light was a good thing. It made it easy to avoid the gaping holes in the floor where an occasional large tile had been removed to help cool a particular work area for some of the operators. The inefficient (by today’s standards) electronics put out a tremendous amount of heat and required a massive battery installation and huge generators to guarantee they wouldn’t crash if the power went out.

Our family, like many others, depended on the Western’s ability to provide what the market needed. The Western was very good at doing this and the demand for what the Western provided created the demand for my father’s programming skills and created the job that put food on our table just like so many others in the area.

The Western had a huge economic impact on the city and county. It wasn’t just the people who got a paycheck from the Western either. Those paychecks funded many of the other jobs, and the paycheck from those jobs funded others. The company paid taxes that helped fund the government. With the large real-estate holdings it made up a not insignificant portion of the Bourbon County tax base. But 75 years of growth culminated in a $270 million deal selling the company to Lincoln National. Over time it was rebranded as American States, and later sold to Safeco. By the end of the millennium all the jobs were gone. One of the downtown structures was torn down and the other sold for $1 and converted to apartments.

The nature of business in 1910, 1967, and 1981 is very different than it is in 2026. It does seem unlikely that any company is going to give the county the type of investment in office real estate that creates a taxable footprint bringing in the $1 million to $2 million that the Western would have likely been paying in today’s dollars. There aren’t a lot of probable futures where a company heavily invests in an existing downtown office building, runs out of space, puts in an $11 million mini-skyscraper and later follows up with another $22 million expansion on property it asks to be annexed to the city.

The massive inefficient computers used a tremendous amount of electricity in their operation and cooling. The entire setup with the rest of the equipment in the tornado-proof bunker wasn’t technology that was well understood by many of the people in the town who weren’t actively working on the computers. The process of writing code using flow charts and diagrams and then going over to a shared terminal to type in code that ran against the miles of black magnetic tape stored on large spools probably looked like a lot of black magic to people of a time when home computers were just beginning to hit the market. But it all represented a free market where technology was being used to rapidly move forward to solve the problems of the time.

The world is different now, the entire bunker of computing power I visited as a child, could all be replaced with an inexpensive laptop or even your phone. And the work done by all the people in those rows of cubicles has been replaced by a few individuals with more efficient tools today. But at the time, all the infrastructure, all the investment in buildings and human capital was exactly what was required to support the national need for insurance. Meeting that need brought millions of dollars from the nation into Bourbon County.

The world’s needs are different today. There is no massive funnel of money waiting to come to the area if we just build a new building and fill it with 1,000 people trying to mimic the way work was done 50 years ago. So in that sense Nick is right. You couldn’t grow the Western today, but you also couldn’t have grown the Western if they had tried to start the same thing in 1810. It was the right solution for the needs of the time and that particular solution is entirely unfit for the unique needs of any other time.

For this area to thrive from the type of economic growth that came from the Western in the past, we can’t continue to focus on how our county met the needs of the past—needs that don’t exist anymore.  We need to be focused on how we can meet the needs that exist today—the needs where there is growing demand going forward.

If we are unable or unwilling to do this, the county will die. Not right away, but it will fade away through hundreds of small losses with no wins of any significance. As businesses close, they won’t be replaced. As the tax base shrinks, everyone will have to pay more and get less. As taxes go up, it will be harder to justify moving to the area and harder for those who are here to justify staying. (And the idea of being unwilling to do this isn’t hypothetical, it is definitely happening.)

But, if we do follow the model of the Western by focusing on what the market needs today, our kids and grandkids will look back on the coming years the same way we look back on the apogee of the Western. With a fondness for the past, but with determination to follow the tradition they saw clearly modeled for them on how to move forward, adapt, and change in meeting the new needs of the nation and world, needs that we probably can’t even imagine today.

Mark Shead

Note: FortScott.biz publishes opinion pieces with a variety of perspectives. If you would like to share your opinion, please send a letter to [email protected].

Opinion

Opinion: Reflection On Friday’s Hearing

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On Friday, the hearing in the election-interference case against Commissioner Mika Milburn-Kee brought something to Bourbon County that we often don’t see in Bourbon County. The hearing had intelligent people disagreeing in a respectful way while working through a process that keeps moving forward toward a resolution. This progress wasn’t because the two sides agreed on the desired outcome — far from it — but the lawyers on both sides and the judge all agreed on the procedure and decorum needed to respectfully work through the legal process.

The background to the hearing is the Attorney General’s case against Milburn-Kee, charging her with entering a restricted voting area containing ballots and causing a disturbance rather than leaving when she was asked to move to the adjacent office. The case was scheduled for a jury trial starting July 6. The Attorney General’s office says it had told the defense there was enough evidence for an additional felony count as well, but left it off the charges in hopes that the defense would first propose a plea deal or diversion agreement.

The day before the hearing, according to the Attorney General, the defense had not proposed any agreement, so the state filed to add the felony charge of intimidation of voters based on the same evidence it had for the misdemeanor charges. The defense objected to the late change, and the judge had to weigh whether to allow the addition or deny it.

The process was beautiful to watch. If you’ve endured the middle-school theatrics of the Bourbon County Commission meetings, watching the polite presentation of these different points of view might have brought a tear of happiness to your eye. The judge asked both sides for their input before making his decision. He gently chided the state for a pattern of late additional charges in other cases, while recognizing that this wasn’t the doing of the particular lawyer on the call. The defense and the state went back and forth over whether the felony charge had been previously discussed — all of it respectful. There was no talking over each other, no cursing, and no absurd requests that leave everyone baffled.

The state made it clear that it had hoped to resolve the matter with a plea (a conviction) or a diversion (no conviction) that would let Milburn-Kee keep her seat. But it believed it had all the evidence needed to convict on the felony and felt it was important to include if the defense wanted to pursue the trial. So if the judge denied the addition of the felony, the state would ask to dismiss the case and refile. This wasn’t the state’s attorney threatening the judge or throwing a fit; she was simply laying out the logical course of action. After making sure neither side had anything else to add, the judge decided not to allow the addition of the felony for the trial scheduled next week, and then immediately worked with the lawyers to set a preliminary hearing for the case the state said it planned to file with all the charges. Once again, there was no huffing, no cursing, and no loudly sliding papers around in front of the mic. No one suggested moving the trial to the county appraiser’s office just to make it inconvenient. It was all the calm, rational, and even boring turning of the legal wheels — the polite back-and-forth of adversarial sides working together through the process that creates what we rely on as justice in our country.

It was a beautiful reminder of what it looks like when a government process is carried out by rational, educated people applying logic to respectfully work together, even when they are trying to achieve different ends — a reminder that stands in stark contrast to much of the irrational flailing we routinely see in the county commission.

Mark Shead

Note: FortScott.biz publishes opinion pieces with a variety of perspectives. If you would like to share your opinion, please send a letter to [email protected].

Bourbon County

Opinion: Upcoming Trial Over Last Election

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This is an opinion column. It is one person’s read of a pending criminal case, not legal advice or a prediction of any outcome. Mika Milburn-Kee is presumed innocent and has the right to contest the charges in court.

The jury trial for Bourbon County Commissioner Mika Milburn-Kee is scheduled to begin July 6, 2026 and to last three days, with a pre-trial conference set for June 26. She is being prosecuted not by the local county attorney but by the Kansas Attorney General’s office, on two misdemeanor counts stemming from an October 25, 2025 incident in the commission meeting room while it was in use as an early-voting site:

  • Count 1 — Interference with the Conduct of Public Business in a Public Building, K.S.A. 21-5922(a)(5). A Class A nonperson misdemeanor carrying up to 12 months in jail and a $2,500 fine.
  • Count 2 — Disorderly Election Conduct, K.S.A. 25-2413(c) — the polling-place “three-foot rule,” which makes it an offense to come within three feet of an election-board table without authority. A Class B nonperson misdemeanor carrying up to 6 months and a $1,000 fine. Under K.S.A. 25-2432, a conviction on this count would force her to forfeit her office.

For background on the charges and the security-camera footage at the center of the case, see our earlier reporting on the jury-trial schedule, the video of the incident, and a step-by-step walkthrough of how the county runs an election.

What makes this trial so unusual

The fascinating thing about this case is how hard it is to find an example that tells you how it might go. In nearly every comparable situation, the accused takes a deal of some kind. By the time the Attorney General is confident enough in an election case to bring charges, I can’t find a single Kansas example of someone who decided that fighting it in front of a jury was worth the risk of losing and possibly going to jail. As FortScott.biz has documented in a review of similar prosecutions, every comparable case that could be found ended in a plea or a diversion. None went to a jury verdict. That makes Milburn-Kee’s decision to demand a jury trial genuinely unusual.

The diversion that probably isn’t coming

The best possible outcome for Commissioner Milburn-Kee would likely have been a diversion — the kind offered to Meghan Blubaugh in her 2024 Sedgwick County case, where she refused to turn a campaign T-shirt inside out while voting. Blubaugh’s deal required about $160 in court costs and completion of a county election-worker training. A diversion is a deferred-prosecution agreement that ends in dismissal rather than a conviction if it’s completed successfully. It would not have triggered the forfeiture-of-office statute. In other words, a diversion might have let Milburn-Kee keep her commission seat.

The catch is timing. Diversions are typically offered early. In the Blubaugh case, the diversion order was filed the day after her arraignment. We are well past that point in Milburn-Kee’s case, which makes a diversion now highly unlikely. A plea deal, on the other hand, often comes together late in the process, so that option may genuinely still be on the table.

What a plea might actually look like

Because no comparable Kansas case has gone all the way to a verdict, it’s hard to say what sentence the Attorney General would push for if Milburn-Kee lost at trial. As a rule, prosecutors ask for harsher penalties when a defendant forces a full trial, while the penalties attached to negotiated pleas tend to be relatively light.

The most useful data point is the recent case of Joe Ceballos-Armendariz, the former mayor of Coldwater, who in April 2026 pled guilty to three counts of the very same statute charged in Milburn-Kee’s Count 2 — K.S.A. 25-2413. In exchange, the state dismissed six felony counts. His sentence: a $2,000 fine plus costs, six months in jail per count (suspended), and a year of probation. His case is not a clean parallel — he was negotiating down from felonies, and non-citizen-voting issues raised stakes that don’t apply here — but it is the clearest recent example of how this particular election statute gets resolved in practice: with a plea, and with jail time suspended.

Why going to trial looks risky

Having watched the actual video evidence in this case, taking it all the way to a jury without some kind of deal looks like an extraordinarily risky move. Unless Milburn-Kee’s attorneys (the Leawood criminal-defense firm of Bath & Edmonds) see a nuance in the election law they believe will virtually guarantee a not-guilty verdict, it is hard to imagine a plea isn’t high on the list of options they are weighing with her.

My best guess is that the defense is using the cost and uncertainty of a three-day jury trial as leverage to negotiate the most favorable plea possible. But that theory weakens the closer we get to July 6. Plea agreements let the state conserve resources — accepting a lighter sentence from someone who admits guilt so prosecutors can spend their effort on the defendants who insist they did nothing wrong that the Attorney General wants to make an example out of. The closer a case gets to trial, the more work the Attorney General has already sunk into it, and the smaller the resource-saving benefit of offering a lenient deal becomes. At some point the calculation stops being about conserving effort and comes down to one question: how confident is the state that it can win in front of a jury?

What the record shows right now

Jury trials are unpredictable, but they still turn on the facts and the law. The defense requested and received the state’s roughly 161-page discovery file on May 28, and the original complaint listed 15 witnesses for the prosecution. Requesting that discovery triggers a limited reciprocal obligation: the defense must let the state inspect any documents or objects it intends to introduce as evidence at trial. So far, nothing of that sort has appeared on the public docket.

For readers who want the commissioner’s own perspective, FortScott.biz has published her letter to the editor. The election-room dispute also resurfaced at the June 15 commission meeting.

The bottom line

If other similar cases are any guide, this case will be settled with some sort of plea deal before the jury, but anything is possible. Milburn-Kee may become the rare Kansas defendant who bets on a jury in an election case.

Being charged with a crime is not the same as being found guilty. The defendant is presumed innocent unless and until proven otherwise.

FortScott.biz publishes opinion pieces with a wide variety of different views. Letters can be submitted to [email protected] for potential publication.

Bourbon County

Recall Petition Filed Against Bourbon County Clerk Susan Walker

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Fort Scott, KS — A recall petition has been filed against Bourbon County Clerk Susan E. Walker.

The recall committee — Kyle R. Parks, Kevin Wagner, and Lyle K. Ownby — filed the petition through the Kansas Secretary of State’s Elections Division. Bourbon County Attorney James Crux reviewed the petition and confirmed it meets statutory requirements.

The petition alleges failure to perform duties prescribed by law, citing the 2025 General Election. Specifically, it alleges that ballots used during early voting contained errors related to the USD 235 school board election and that the County Clerk failed to promptly correct the issue in a timely manner, allowing incorrect ballots to continue being used.

Under Kansas law (K.S.A. 25-4322), the recall committee has 90 days to gather a sufficient number of verified signatures from registered voters before a recall election can be scheduled.

A copy of the petition is attached below.

Amended Recall Petition (PDF)

FortScott.biz will continue to provide updates on this matter as it develops.

Fort Scott Community College

State of FSCC Luncheon – May 21st

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You’re invited to attend the State of FSCC on May 21 at 12:00 p.m. in the Ellis Fine Arts Building.

This is a great opportunity for our community to hear important updates on the college’s progress, priorities, and future direction. We encourage all faculty and staff to attend and be part of the conversation as we continue moving FSCC forward.

Lunch will be provided, and we hope you’ll take this time to connect, stay informed, and show your support for our students and institution.

Please RSVP using the link below.

https://forms.gle/z5ccXuBsdFdGzHxT6

We look forward to seeing you there!

 

Opinion

Opinion: When Truth Is Stranger Than Fiction

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April 1st has long been an important date in journalism. From the BBC’s “Bumper Spaghetti Crop” story in 1957 to the ads saying that Taco Bell had bought and renamed the  Liberty Bell to Taco Liberty Bell in 1996, the date has always offered a fun diversion — and a good opportunity for self-reflection. Just how gullible am I?

FortScott.biz publishes a few April Fool’s posts each year. Past stories have included everything from a new snake pit going into Gunn Park to an alligator petting zoo that organizers pointed out would help keep the local emergency room in business. This year, we had a resolution against light pollution in which commissioners said they would outlaw any light source stronger than “a jar of lightning bugs with a towel draped over it.” Another described efforts to build a new monument where important events could be inscribed. Originally, the plans called for it to be 15 feet tall, but to accommodate the many lawsuits, organizers were now trying to raise trillions of dollars for a 4.5-mile-tall monolith.

(Archive of FortScott.biz’s April Fool’s posts.)

Usually, I feel we do a good job of including enough absurdity that any reader paying attention will quickly catch on to the joke. This year, though, we reached a new milestone. On April 3rd, I started getting messages that KOMB was reading our April Fool’s stories as part of their news segment — without mentioning they came from FortScott.biz or that they had been published on April 1st.
I’m not sure how you read stuff like this with a straight face:
“We have lost touch with the natural darkness that is a vital part of Bourbon County’s attractive quality of life,” one commissioner said while holding a printed chart no one could read because the room lights had already been turned off in anticipation of the vote.
And yet, here we were. What should be an obviously absurd joke was being read as actual news. I called the radio station and explained that while we’re happy to have them share content from FortScott.biz, it would be nice if they mentioned the source — and suggested they might want to exercise a bit of caution with absurd stories published on April Fool’s Day.
We find ourselves in a situation where a “photograph” of nothing but a black rectangle — purporting to show the commissioners signing an ordinance that would require nighttime driving to rely on “moonlight” and “quiet-instinct” — doesn’t seem far-fetched enough. (Commissioner Allen texted me to say thank you for capturing his “good side” in the blank “photograph.”)
On one hand, maybe I’m losing my ability to think of things that are truly absurd. Maybe that’s a faculty that diminishes with age, and statements like this just reveal my waning capability to conjure up silliness:
Commissioners said the new rules are necessary to preserve residents’ God-given right to see every star in the heavens, including several “fainter ones that have historically been none of our business.”
On the other hand, maybe the absurdity of what is actually happening has simply caught up with fiction. Consider the following:
  1. A good number of the past few Bourbon County commissioners launched a lawsuit against their own official positions, then once seated, rescinded a motion by the county’s lawyer to have the lawsuit dismissed, then flipped county resources to attack the co-defendants.
  2. Bourbon County Commissioners have literally outlawed the level of noise produced by many relatively subdued evening conversations — meaning any impassioned discussion of politics or sports is an offense punishable by a fine. Also banned: the operation of most home air-conditioning units. Based on the text of the actual ordinance, the commissioners’ willful continuation of road maintenance appears to put them on the hook for $500 for each road grader operated each day in the county. We have commissioners who carefully reviewed payroll, voted to approve it, and then claimed they had approved an illegal payment.
  3. An elected official had her agenda item removed, then had her 3-minute public comment cut short when the commissioners terminated the entire meeting. While the audio recording is sometimes hard to hear, it captured the crystal clear sound of her calling them “chicken shit” as she left the room.

Any of these things would pass as a fine April Fool’s story. Unfortunately, these are the things that are actually happening in our community.

We find ourselves here because of a lack of leadership — not a lack of difficult, cerebral, highly abstract leadership ideas, but much more mundane leadership skills. Basic things like having enough curiosity and general knowledge to ask, “How loud is the 45 dB noise level that we are talking about banning?” Enough trust of employees to ask, “How much trouble will it cause if we stop letting you edit your own timesheets?” And even just leaning a tad more toward self-preservation than hubris — enough to move five feet to an adjacent room as soon as you discover your presence might be violating election laws.

Maybe this can change. There have been a few recent, small glimmers of common sense. Three of the five commissioners took feedback from employees and voted to let them edit their own timecards, as they had always done in the past. Taking months to change a trivial payroll setting to fix a problem of the commissioner’s own making is hardly something to celebrate as progress. However, without the two new commissioners, the vote would have failed. Maybe the county is starting to see some return on investment in those two additional seats.

For better or worse, that is where we are as Bourbon County — a place where even the most outrageous April Fool’s stories can pass for actual news on the radio. But maybe we are starting to turn in a better direction. Maybe, just maybe, by next year, Bourbon County’s reality will be different enough that April Fool’s articles will sound enough like fiction to not pass for news on the radio.

Mark Shead

Note: FortScott.biz publishes opinion pieces with a variety of perspectives. If you would like to share your opinion, please send a letter to [email protected]. 

Opinion

Opinion: A Necessary Small Step Toward Functional County Government

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It is impossible to watch last week’s county commissioner meeting without recognizing that there are major problems in our local government. It can be difficult to follow the video because it isn’t immediately apparent what reports are being discussed, some of the payroll terms can be a bit obscure, and it isn’t clear that Commissioner Tran knows what data he says didn’t copy over. After talking to several people at the county, below is my best understanding of what happened, along with my conclusion about the necessary next step.

In 2025, the county commissioners decided to stop having the county clerk’s office do payroll and instead outsource it to PayEntry through the reseller, Emerson & Co. The commissioners also hired Laura Krom to be responsible for administering the PayEntry payroll system as well as providing administrative support for the commissioners in other ways.

As part of the setup process, existing payrolls in 2025 were copied from the existing CIC system to the PayEntry system. That way PayEntry would have all the data to run reports for the full year of 2025. Without this import, PayEntry would not be able to produce the reports, including the W2 tax forms, at the end of 2025 because it wouldn’t have the data from the period when the other system was being used for payroll.

Each year, part of the payroll responsibility is to provide reports to the workers’ compensation insurance company. These reports are used to audit the workers’ compensation information from the previous year, and the process is used to set the rate that the county pays for workers’ compensation in the coming year.

Before the recording started at last Monday’s meeting, there was evidently some type of conversation (or disagreement) between the commissioners and the clerk over a report. According to the clerk, she then went into PayEntry (the system administered by the commissioner’s assistant, Laura Krom), printed out the report in question, and gave it to the commissioners. This is the report that Tran mentions having received in the video.

I’d encourage you to watch the full video of the meeting, but here are the two minutes most relevant for our discussion.

Here is my walk-through of what seems to be happening. However, my final conclusion is based on a wider range of possible facts.

Commissioner Tran claimed that a report that the county clerk had given the commissioners 5 minutes before the meeting had been requested by the commissioner’s assistant and new payroll administrator, Laura Krom, weeks earlier. Clerk Susan Walker says that wasn’t the case and that Krom had asked her to do the Worker Compensation audit, which Walker declined to do since it is the role of the new payroll administrator.

Tran goes on to ask that Laura Krom be given access to PayEntry (which she administers), then corrects himself and says CIC (which Clerk Walker administers). Walker tells Tran that if Krom uses the old data in CIC, it will not give Krom the correct information she needs for the Worker’s Compensation report. She then explains how to run the correct report in PayEntry to accomplish the goal. Tran then says the Karma (from the workers’ compensation insurance company) had said that the “information that Laura is getting from [the clerk’s] office is not the information [Karma] needs.” Walker says that there was no information provided to Krom from her office other than the 941 reports (a quarterly IRS payroll report), and that what Krom provided Karma was a report that Krom had created in PayEntry on her own. Walker goes on to say there is another report in PayEntry that was built to do what Karma is asking for—it just has to be run with the correct parameters.

At this point, Tran starts laughing. He says whatever he is laughing at is the opposite of laughing at Walker. Walker expresses her frustration with the situation, says she’d be happy to help show Krom how to run the report if Krom would just come in and ask for help with it, but that, instead of asking for help, there are a bunch of “backdoor conversations accusing me of things that I’m not doing.” At this point, Tran utters his infamous, “Are we talking about your feelings again? ‘Cause I’m not here to talk about your feelings, I’m here to talk about facts.”

Words are being said, but communication is not happening. How could it have played out differently? Tran clearly has no idea what Walker is saying when it comes to the reports he is asking for. And that’s okay. He may not have any experience with running payroll, but that means that no matter what Walker says, he doesn’t have any way to know if it will solve the issue or not. However, the commissioners hired someone whom they believe is the best person to run the payroll system for Bourbon County, Laura Krom. Tran indicates that Laura Krom had just been out there before the recording started when he said, “Laura came out here, and I asked her point-blank what she needed.” Unless she left the meeting, she is apparently sitting right in the next room, but not participating in the conversation at this point.

Walker says that Krom just needs to log in to the PayEntry system and run the workers’ compensation report with the correct settings, which she describes for them.  Now, maybe that would resolve the entire issue. Maybe it wouldn’t. Tran doesn’t know enough about the payroll system to know either way. So what options did Tran have at this point? He could:

  1. Start laughing in a way that seems strange and inappropriate.
  2. Ignore the easy-to-validate information Walker has just presented him with while claiming he is just there for the “facts.”
  3. Ask Krom to run the report and see if it provides what she needs.

Inexplicably, he chooses to do both 1 & 2, but not 3. Apparently, using the information he has just been provided to try to solve the stated problem is neither in his skill set nor part of his desired course of action.
So how could it have played out if Bourbon County had a different chair of the county commission? What if we had someone with the leadership skills or problem-solving experience to say, “Let’s try running that report then”?

If Walker is right, Krom runs the report, and 60 seconds later, the confusion is solved, and the meeting moves on. Karma at the insurance company gets what she needs, and everything runs smoothly. On the other hand, if the report doesn’t give Krom what she needs, the county has still made progress. In that scenario, it should be very easy to see the source of the confusion, rectify it, and move on with what is needed.

Regardless of which way you think things would have gone had they tried to run the report, Tran’s behavior in this situation is 100% the opposite of what our county needs. The fact that he clearly doesn’t understand payroll enough to know what he is asking for can be excused. Commissioners can’t be experts on every single detail of the county.  What is not excusable is the fact that there is a very simple path forward to achieve the goal and resolve the situation that might take only a minute or two. He completely ignores this path and instead plows ahead, using his position as chair of the county commission to create an entirely avoidable self-inflicted debacle.

It is hard to overstate the magnitude of the core issue here. This doesn’t fall into a trivial “misunderstanding”. Monday’s meeting was a catastrophic failure of foundational leadership by the chair.

Imagine Tran sitting in the driver’s seat of a car that is accelerating toward a cliff. He tells the passenger the vehicle needs to be slowed. The passenger, who has way more experience in motor vehicles, says, “all you need to do is take your foot off the gas pedal.” The first thing Tran should do is take his foot off the gas pedal to see if the suggested solution works. If the passenger is wrong and it doesn’t help, they can immediately move on to try something else. If the passenger is right and it does help, then he now has a solution to the problem.

What if Tran applied the same course of action as what we saw in the Commission meeting? Well, he’d keep his foot firmly pinning the pedal to the floor and laugh. Then he’d say, “Are we talking about your feelings again? Because I’m not here to talk about your feelings, I’m here to talk about facts.” All the time, he’d have the gas pedal floored, completely ignoring the information he was just given that might actually help resolve the situation. Bourbon County needs leadership that can use the information presented to ask for the next reasonable step forward. This appears to be a skill that Tran either lacks or chooses not to use.

I’ve seen many calls on Facebook for Tran to resign over this incident. The optimist in me wants to think may still be a role Tran can play that serves Bourbon County, perhaps even continuing as a County Commissioner. However, my optimism does not extend to his position as chair of the commission. The last meeting made that clear. That chair position minimizes his ability to draw on his strengths while magnifying his weaknesses. Based on what we saw in the last commission meeting, I personally feel that any continuation of his role as the Chair of the Bourbon County Commission will cause greater harm in the future. He should resign from the chair immediately.

Is my reasoning sound, or did I make a mistake in my logic? I’d love to hear your concurrence or disagreement.

Mark Shead

Note: FortScott.biz publishes opinion pieces with a variety of perspectives. If you would like to share your opinion, please send a letter to [email protected].