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.
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:
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.
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.
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].
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:
Start laughing in a way that seems strange and inappropriate.
Ignore the easy-to-validate information Walker has just presented him with while claiming he is just there for the “facts.”
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].
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In the Bourbon County minutes from December 19th, 2017, the county voted to buy 2 Caterpillar 120M2 road graders. Presumably, those are still being used. According to the spec sheet, these tractors are 8 meters long and produce 106 dB when measured in accordance with ISO 6395:2008. That ISO standard says that noise levels for equipment that is 8 meters long should be measured from 16 meters away.
CAT promotional photo of 120M2 Equipment
If a sound is 106 dB at 16 meters (~52 feet), it will be right around 102.9 dB at 75 feet.
Feel free to double-check my math. Here is the sound attenuation formula I used.
According to Bourbon County Ordinance 50-25, which Tran and Beerbower voted for, but Milburn voted against, the following is illegal:
Any noise greater than 55 dB outdoors (7 a.m. to 10 p.m.) near sensitive areas (residences)….These measurements recorded within 75 feet from the source shall be prima facie evidence of a violation of this section.
The ordinance goes on to say that any person violating this ordinance is subject to a fine of not more than $500, with a new offense (and presumably another fine) for each day the violation is repeated.
Best I can tell, our elected officials have passed an ordinance that makes it illegal to operate a road grader during the day on roads where there is a house. Does the county buy new road graders that are smaller and quieter? Do the roads need to be graded by hand or mules now? Are all the roads in the county going to be paved so road graders are no longer needed? Who pays the fine? Is it the operator or the county commissioners?
Fortunately, the stakes are low for this particular ordinance. If the county ever tries to fine someone (or fine themselves) for breaking this ordinance and it ends up in court, I’m sure a judge would have a good chuckle, asking the two commissioners what they were thinking when someone they tried to fine $500 points out all the county operations that fall under the wide umbrella of 50-25.
It is silly and kind of funny. To be fair, everyone makes mistakes. Many mistakes are what we call honest mistakes. Other mistakes are considered negligence. The difference is whether the decision-maker acted with prudence or recklessness. Neither of the two commissioners who voted for it thought to ask, “How loud is the equipment the county operates compared to what we are trying to outlaw?” Neither of the two commissioners who voted for it thought to ask, “How loud is my air conditioner?” Neither of the two commissioners who voted for it thought to follow their lawyers’ advice when he suggested the proposal be given to the planning committee for consideration of the potential impact.
What do you think? Is 50-25 an honest mistake, or is it a sign of recklessness?
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].
GriefShare is a non-denominational 13-week seminar support group.
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We all grieve differently.
There are no rules nor measurements such as time.
For more than 25 years GriefShare has helped over
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Mondays 5:00pm—7:00pm
January 5, 2026 through March 30, 2026
Mary Queen of Angels, Room 203
705 S Holbrook
Fort Scott, KS 66701
GriefShare is a non-denominational 13-week seminar support group.
Professionally developed videos and a workbook give you
practical suggestions from counselors, pastors and experts
in grief recovery, along with group participation.
We all grieve differently.
There are no rules nor measurements such as time.
For more than 25 years GriefShare has helped over
1 million people heal from the pain of grief.
All materials are FREE, Snacks provided.
Contact Us Today
Mondays 5:00pm—7:00pm
January 5, 2026 through March 30, 2026
Mary Queen of Angels, Room 203
705 S Holbrook
Fort Scott, KS 66701
When the noise resolution was presented on Monday, the commissioners’ lawyer said it should be given to the planning committee. After hearing this recommendation, Beerbower moved to vote on it in the current meeting. He and Tran passed it over Milburn’s objections.
If you read through what they voted for, you’ll notice something interesting in this section:
Now you might see the term “heating toss” and assume it is a misspelling that just went unnoticed. Perhaps the commissioners who voted for it treated the whole adage of “read things carefully before you vote for them” just like the “listen to your lawyer.” Stuff like that might be nice to say, but don’t let it get in the way of creating new regulations for the taxpayers. What good is a commission meeting if the citizens have the same legal rights after the meeting as they had before?
So while you might think they didn’t actually take the time to read it, why assume the worst? I’d like to suggest that we assume the best!
Let’s assume Beerbower and Tran DID indeed read it carefully, thought through exactly the repercussions of what the document says, carefully examined any side effects, and believe it does exactly what they want to see enacted for the betterment of Bourbon County. If we make those assumptions, maybe “heating toss” is the name of a game, a time-honored tradition that has been played in Bourbon County all the way back to the time when dragoons camped at Fort Scott, and bison roamed the plains.
The game is often called “hot potato.” With careful reflection, Tran and Beerbower have determined that they want to prevent people from playing “Heating Toss” (aka “hot potato”) in Bourbon County. You may think it is a harmless game, but they know better and have made a law to fine people who introduce this hated game (well, hated by two of the commissioners anyway) into the county. It is for the betterment of the county as a whole! You may think that you’d rather live in a county where commissioners do not waste their time making laws against various children’s games, but you’d be wrong. Wrong, wrong, wrong. Your government knows better. You may just be too dumb to understand.
That’s the optimistic view that assumes they carefully read what they voted on. Or maybe, just maybe, they just didn’t take the time to read what they were voting for.
Had they read it, you’d think they might have questioned whether it was a good idea to fine people $500 for “any noise” that is greater than 45 dB at 75 feet between the hours of 10 pm and 7 am. That is a level of sound that includes things like older air conditioning units, a dog barking, a donkey braying, or starting a semi.
But surely they wouldn’t vote for something they didn’t fully understand or hadn’t read. Right?
GriefShare is a non-denominational 13-week seminar support group.
Professionally developed videos and a workbook give you
practical suggestions from counselors, pastors and experts
in grief recovery, along with group participation.
We all grieve differently.
There are no rules nor measurements such as time.
For more than 25 years GriefShare has helped over
1 million people heal from the pain of grief.
All materials are FREE, Snacks provided.
Contact Us Today
Mondays 5:00pm—7:00pm
January 5, 2026 through March 30, 2026
Mary Queen of Angels, Room 203
705 S Holbrook
Fort Scott, KS 66701
GriefShare is a non-denominational 13-week seminar support group.
Professionally developed videos and a workbook give you
practical suggestions from counselors, pastors and experts
in grief recovery, along with group participation.
We all grieve differently.
There are no rules nor measurements such as time.
For more than 25 years GriefShare has helped over
1 million people heal from the pain of grief.
All materials are FREE, Snacks provided.
Contact Us Today
Mondays 5:00pm—7:00pm
January 5, 2026 through March 30, 2026
Mary Queen of Angels, Room 203
705 S Holbrook
Fort Scott, KS 66701
In October, I wrote a piece about how the commissioners had passed a resolution to ban running a particular computer program. Ostensibly, they were trying to make it illegal to run loud generators, but instead of writing an ordinance about generators or sound, they issued an ordinance that would include three silent computers that can fit in the palm of your hand without saying a single thing about what they claimed they were trying to address.
Despite having full access to paid legal counsel, despite technologically savvy citizens who are happy to provide advice for free, despite knowing that the issue with a loud generator is, well, the loud generator, the commissioners managed to pass an ordinance that was completely divorced from the actual sound problem. It was written to ban what a tech- and business-savvy middle schooler might run in their bedroom, while being useless when it comes to preventing another identical generator-run installation that uses a different algorithm.
If the commissioners, in an effort to prevent loud, noisy generators, accidentally ended up banning things so trivial, we should be very concerned that when they spend your taxpayer money in lobbing their nuclear bomb of zoning at solar and wind installations, it might not only miss what they say is the mark, but do significant collateral damage. That was my concern back in October. What happened since that silly moratorium made me realize that I severely underestimated just how bad that blast radius could be.
There is a planning committee created by the commissioners to make recommendations on zoning. As usual, this committee contains people who were not elected. They also didn’t go through the normal process of having citizens submit letters of interest. Instead, the members were hand-selected by the commissioners. This isn’t necessarily a bad way to select people and it has a distinct advantage for anyone trying to figure out where the commissioners are trying to take the county. This hand selection means that when the committee passes a resolution, it is being made by the people the commissioners felt most represented their goals for the future.
So with that background, residents should be paying very close attention when the planning committee votes on a resolution. We got a very insightful glimpse on page 7 of the agenda packet for the commissioners meeting on 11/17. There was a resolution, passed unanimously by the planning committee, that said:
The Planning Committee, passes unanimously. recommends that the Bourbon County Board of Commissioners enact a moratorium, effective immediately, requiring that any new business—specifically, commercial or industrial—that is not agricultural in nature and located in unincorporated areas of the county, be required to obtain a special use permit prior to commencing operations. This moratorium should reference the existing Bourbon County zoning (taxation) map as the basis for determining current land use designations.
The purpose of this moratorium is to protect the county and its residents while the Planning Committee continues the process of developing more detailed and comprehensive zoning regulations.
There were some legal issues with the recommendation, so the commissioners didn’t end up discussing it, but even if they couldn’t put a moratorium on all businesses worded in this way, it doesn’t diminish the desired goal. We can clearly see what the committee (and the commissioners who appointed them) see as a desired future. The planning committee, that hand-selected group the commissioners thought were the best people in the county to accomplish their zoning goals, unanimously resolved to recommend a moratorium on all new non-agricultural businesses in the county. It didn’t pass by a small margin; it wasn’t just discussed. They unanimously passed a resolution to make this recommendation, and that is a very big deal.
Some might say it was just the political back and forth and doesn’t really mean anything, that some of the people voting for it didn’t think it would pass, etc. But consider the actual implications: If you want to start a commercial lawn mowing business and you are outside the city limits, they want you to have to get special permission from the commissioners. If you want to start a business doing small manufacturing of high-end telescopes, the resolution recommends that your business should be illegal until the commissioners give it their blessing. If you want to start exercising your skills as a mechanic, start a printing company, create an LLC to make furniture, or anything else in the rural county areas, every single person on this committee voted that you should be required to come hat in hand to the commissioners and answer all their questions about your business and beg them to make an exception to the moratorium to allow you to pursue your business idea.
This desired change by the planning committee is a fundamental shift. We currently live in a county where the default position is that you are allowed to start any legal business and move forward with it. You might have a good idea and do well. You might have a bad idea and go bankrupt. Either way, you are free to pursue your capitalistic endeavors without being subject to the whims, biases, and the sometimes general confusion of the commissioners.
For an average member of the community, voting for a resolution to recommend such an action would have come with a huge reputational risk. Would you really want to be on the record as having voted to move from a default of saying yes to business to a default of saying, “you have to get permission from the commissioners first”? Somehow, not a single person on the committee, who I might remind you, were hand-selected by the commissioners, looked at the resolution and said, “I’m not sure I want my name on something that does this to our local economy.” Instead, everysingleone voted for it.
As I’ve said before, the issue with zoning is not whether there is a hypothetical way to implement it that would do no or only minimal harm. The question is how likely we are to get a future where the damage from zoning isn’t egregiously worse than whatever the commissioners think they are trying to attack by this massive expansion of their powers. This unanimous resolution from the planning committee gives us a peek into the future we are headed toward, a future that further increases the probability that the “cure” of zoning will turn out to be worse than the “disease.”
Mark Shead
Note: FortScott.biz publishes opinion pieces with a variety of perspectives. If you would like to share a perspective or opinion, please send a letter to [email protected].
Mark explains two approaches to dealing with loud generators. This video shows the protections we have in place today and contrasts them with the proposals for the future.
