All posts by Mark Shead

County Commission Meeting – Dec 5th

Tax Sale

The county has compared the list of people who owe taxes from 2008 and 2009 who were not published in the paper and still have unpaid taxes. There were 35 names from 2008 and 50 from 2009. Some of the names have multiple properties. One has 8 properties with unpaid taxes. There are a total of 43 properties from 2008 and 75 from 2009 that were not published and still had unpaid taxes when the report was run. During the commission meeting several properties were identified where the taxes had been paid since the report had been run.

Since the publication in the newspaper is what triggers the bid off, the properties have yet to start the redemption period. For homestead property, this is three years from the date of publication. For non-homestead property the redemption period is two years.

Attorney General & County Treasurer

The commissioners have not heard anything back from the Attorney General about the investigation into the allegations against the Bourbon County Treasurer. Their understanding was that the Attorney General’s office would get back to them and let them know if it was going to be pursued further or not. They expected to have heard something back by now, but pointed out that with all the other things the Attorney General deals with, this might not be the highest priority.

Are the overpaid taxes being refunded?

Currently the commissioners do not have a copy of the details that Terry Sercer compiled. They only have the report which we posted here. Typically the county refunds overpayments for other types of fees if it is more than $5.

The commissioners are hesitant to request the information from Mr. Sercer until they hear back from the Attorney General. If the Attorney General is pursuing an investigation, they don’t want to have information released to the public that could compromise his efforts.

Is there any effort to pursue recovering the taxes/interest that was not charged correctly? (Under KSA 79-1703).

Not at this point, but this couldn’t be done until the Attorney General is finished with his investigation.

Is it possible to get the details of the audit report?

The details showing which properties have over paid and which properties have underpaid their interest is not something that the Commissioners currently have. The Commissioners don’t want to request this information from Mr. Sercer until they hear back from the Attorney General.

Has there been any effort to ask the Attorney General about the status?

Chairman Endicott wasn’t sure of the date, but said that within the past few weeks Terri Johnson (County Attorney) called to ask the Attorney General’s office about the status and was told that they didn’t have any record of a request for an investigation on the matter. She sent them another copy of the letter and then followed up with them. Again they did not have any record of the request.  She faxed it to them and immediately called them back and they then confirmed that they had received it.

Rock Quarry

There was some discussion about how to move the registration from the former rock quarry to the new quarry and also some discussion about the blasting at the new facility.

Sewer District

John Scott is going to use his house as a distribution point for the manuals and warranty information for the grinder pumps in the new sewer district. He was concerned because the paper work said it was a 2 year warranty, but when they were deciding which pumps to buy they selected the more expensive pumps because they had a longer warranty.

There is one home where the grinder pump is coming into a basement too high and there was some discussion about how to go about getting it fixed.

Misc

At least two commissioners are going to the Neosho County rock quarry to view their operation at 9am. They will also be at the Airport Advisory meeting at 12 noon on Tuesday.

An individual asked if they were going to pave 180th street. He said there were a lot of dump trucks coming through and tearing it up.

Arcadia Area News

Twenty -four graduates and friends of Arcadia High School Our Gang gathered in Arcadia Community Center on Saturday evening, December 3, for an early winter meeting to enjoy the Potluck dinner and fellowship time. Anyone who attended the Arcadia Schools is welcome to join their friends at these gatherings.


Mary Hines Cattaneo, Mulberry and Charles Corporon, Pittsburg both former Arcadians met by chance at Sunset Manor recently to visit their friends who now reside in the Manor in Frontenac. They are Bill Dobbins, Betty Baima. Marie Rodich from Arcadia and Ray Cattaneo from Mulberry. His family at one time bought the Arcadia Journal and combind it with Mulberry News and re-named it THE NEWS JOURNAL.

Rose Campbell, a one time teacher in Arcadia Schools and Charles had just recently returned from each visiting their own sisters. Rose spent time with Mary Logan in Wichita, while Charles drove on to McPherson to spend time with Portie Hughes.


Special guests from Moran, Kansas, Margaret Jackman, Cheryl Wallis and Nancy Houk attended the Arcadia Christian Church on the first Sunday in December to hear their cousin Bob Cable deliver the Morning sermon. His son, Nate Cable, from Lamar joined the family group and all were guests at the first of the month Sunday dinner. Pastor Charles Cable unable to attend but he and Willa Cable furnished the Chicken Mary Chicken as a treat for their congregation. It was delivered this month by Patty Peterson and enjoyed by the twenty-eight present. It was announced that on Christms Morning, December 25, there will be no Sunday School Classes held and Morning Services will begin at 10:30 AM Christmas Morning.


Saturday Morning, December 3, a celebration was held for a Happy Birthday to honor Jesus. The hostess was Patty Peterson, this, one of many Christmas brunches that Patty has held through the years since she and Gary have lived in Arcadia. Several of the guests served as helpers including Cathy Allen who was the greeter at the door. An important helper was Stuart Semple who baked the cinnamon rolls as Patty was giving the Morning Devotions. The twenty-two guests were Ahris Sprague, Cheyenne Mellon,who assisted in serving tea at the table; Mary V. Shead, Courtney Allen, Carolyn Girard, Carol Bridgewater, Ava Mae Adams, Mary Lee Payne, Vera Parrish,Shirley Garrett, Willa Cable, Ashley & Elizabeth Semple, Linda Bridgewater, Evelyn Bryant, Judy Rawlings, Betty Dehn, Janet Van Leeuwen, Lilly Coonrod, Kelly Reves.


I am pleased to report that Ron Wolf did not have a Heart Attack as I reported and did not go to K.C. Hospital. He was able to call and excuse my error.


The Jack & Mary Lee Payne Family met on Friday after Thanksgiving in the home of Ron and Cindy Morton, Excelsior Springs, Missouri for a delicious dinner of Ham, turkey, trimmings and Desserts. Present were Jeff and Sherry Sisney; David, Amy, Drew and Lane Carpenter; Steve, Kelly Base, Ben, Faith and Elijah Base; James, Nikki, Lainey and Cooper O’Dell; Autuam, Kimberlee, Maddie, Isaiah and Malloree Peppers and Seth Morton. A great time of playing games and much visiting was enjoyed by all.


Enjoy Arcadia City Christmas Lights each evening as they go on at dark. Thanks to City employees who worked to decorate our town. A few years ago we had none until YOUNG MOMS ORGANIZATION furnished them for the city.


Walter Foulk spent three days during Thanksgiving week in St. Charles, MO. with his wife, Mary Foulk and family members including Lora and Scott Pratt, Diana Butler & sons Samuel and Emmett Butler, Sarah Butler and fiance Louie with their son Georgros


Lou and Betty Dehn visited in Versailles, MO. during Thanksgiving with her Mother, Ollie Hill and brother, Donald Hill where they had dinner. Ollie returned to Arcadia with the Dehns to spend a week. The two ladies had tea one afternoon with Mary V. Shead.

Chamber Coffee – Ruddicks

The Chamber Coffee on December 1st was held at Ruddicks at 117 S. National. Ruddicks was started in 1934. The current owner is Terry Davenport. He has been at Ruddicks for 40  years–first as an employee and now as owner.

In addition to furniture, Ruddicks also offers sound equipment and floor materials and installation. Mr. Davenport said that they can order nearly anything and encouraged people to ask if they need something that they don’t have in stock.

 

Everything Pets Ribbon Cutting

Everything Pets had a ribbon cutting Saturday morning at 9:30. The store is owned by Dawn Bryant and is located at 605 S. National. They have large selection of pets and supplies with everything from snakes to flying squirrels to puppies.

Please stop by and welcome this new business to Fort Scott.

Commission Meeting – December 2nd

Mr. Meara came through with a cart with all the tax foreclosure cases. He was taking them up to file in court. He wanted to show he commissioners what 193 foreclosure cases looked like.

Potholes

Jennifer Miller-Connet works for Fort Scott broadcasting and lives in Vernon County. She says she was headed into Bourbon County at 4 am to open Radio Shack up for Black Friday. She hit potholes that caused $803 worth of damage near the state line. She feels like as a tax payer the road should have been taking care off. She said there was no way to drive around the holes.

Chairman Endicott asked how many miles were on her car. She said 125,000 miles and that the car is a low riding Mazda Protege. She felt that there should be some type of compensation from the county. The commissioners said that she should file an insurance claim and the insurance company would make a determination.

Roads

The commissioners decided to buy 50 culverts from Judy’s Iron and Metal. The rock crusher came in Monday. They are looking at getting a couple Ricoh G700 SE GPS cameras to give to the road crews to take photos of things that can be placed on the GPS maps. The cost of the two cameras will come to $2,901. The county has sold some data to a mapping company so the funds are available for the purchase.

They are also planning on buying a label gun to put labels on signs so if one is found in the ditch, the county will know where it came from.

The date for the lawsuit related to the sewer district has been bumped back. The County Attorney pointed out that this is an existing case–not a new lawsuit. They date has been bumped back as further discovery is done and it is expected that it won’t actually go to court until next year.

Tax Sale

Mr. Meara came back at 10:30. Defendants of foreclosure lawsuits that live in KS will be notified by the sheriff. Defendants out of state will be notified by certified letter. Everything has been filed that Mr. Meara was given that was possible to file. He is going to give the commissioners a list of the properties that have not yet been published and that he was unable to file. Those will need to be published. There may be some from 2008 and 2009 that need to be published as well.

Mr. Meara said there were 17 to 25 properties that were not published in 2007. He said that it was probably just an oversight on the part of the Treasure’s office and that there didn’t appear to be any pattern. They did not appear to all be payment plan properties.

Terri Johnson (County Attorney) said it appears that the redemption period starts at the date of publication and that the publication must occur for the property to be property “bid off.” So properties that were not published for 2007 taxes will need to be published before the three year redemption period can begin. Commissioner Endicott said that it didn’t seem right that someone could have not paid their taxes for three years and then they get another three years if they were left out of the publication. The law does allow for there to be errors and omissions in the publication. However, this allowance seems to be more aimed at preventing people from saying their property was improperly foreclosed on due to a printing smudge or mistake and may offer less protection for the county if proper procedure wasn’t followed.

Partial redemption cannot be invoked once the county files the foreclosure. So once the county files the foreclosure paperwork, those properties must have their taxes, fees, and interest paid in full in order to avoid a tax sale.

There was some discussion as to whether or not a non-homestead property could be partially redeemed before the county files for foreclosure. The scenario would be a business that had unpaid taxes since 2007 that paid their 2007 taxes in order to remove it from foreclosure lawsuits that Mr. Meara filed this morning. The statutes appear to only mention partial redemption under the section that applies to homestead properties. The other sections seem to indicate that once a property is bid off to the county, the entire amounted owed on that property must be paid in order to avoid foreclosure. It appears that non-homestead properties have been allowed to partial redemption in the past and the attorneys were not clear if the statues indeed prohibit partial redemptions for non-homestead properties. They are going to look into it to see.

Clarifications

The lawsuit summons from last week was not a new lawsuit.

Larkin Witt Christmas Open House

Larkin Witt Financial Group held an open house December 1st from 10 to 2 at their office at 207 E. 1st Street.  The event drew quite a number of people with over 60 individuals visiting before noon.

Bob Larkin has been involved in financial services for over 40 years. His first office was in Security State Bank in 1974. He grew up on a farm in Fulton, still farms today and was even the co-owner of a local John Deere dealership.

Jordan Witt graduated from PSU (finance) and KU (MBA) and is heavily involved in the Fort Scott community. In the last election he successfully ran for the U234 school board and has been serving there.

The office recently launched their new website at www.larkinwitt.com. The site has a number of financial calculators, articles, research and forms for requesting quotes on insurance and other services.

Jim Brown’s Incredible Light Show

Jim Brown has quite a Christmas lights display at his house on 13 S. Margrave. His home is located just South of Wall Street behind An Octave Above. You can tune your radio to 100.5 FM and see nearly 8,000 lights running a custom made light show synced to the music. The music is on a 16 minute loop and he plans to run it from 6:30 to 9:30 every evening through Christmas.

Below is a video of the house. If you are reading this in an email, you may have to visit FortScott.Biz to watch it.

Christmas Lights 2011 from Jim Brown on Vimeo.

Two years ago at Thanksgiving Mr. Brown found DoItYourselfChristmas.com where people talk about how to do animated lighting synced to music. He bought the printed circuits and components and made all the controllers himself by soldering the components together.

Mr. Brown said the actual setup of the lights took about two days, but he has spent all of his spare time from the last two years creating the circuit boards and programming all the songs. There are 72 channels that can be independently turned on and off and dimmed from 100% to 0%. Mr. Brown said that programming a single song took about 20 hours. His personal computer controls the circuit boards that control the lights.  He programmed the songs using a free piece of software called Vixen.

He runs this off of a temporary electric service on a separate meter. After measuring it the first night, he calculates it will cost $0.60 per night. Mr. Brown said a static display would probably cost three times that because the animated display has many light off or dimmed at any given time.

Mr. Brown said to make sure not to forget to tune the radio to 100.5 because it just looks like a bunch of flashing lights with out the music.

If you live in Fort Scott, you definitely need to take some time to go by and see the light show.

 

 

Correction and Clarification

Executive sessions

Back in October, we looked at whether or not an executive session was illegal. Part of the argument was that attorney client privilege can only be used when no one other than the client is present.  The County Attorney gave me a copy of Attorney General Opinion 92-56. The opinion relates to KPERS, but it does establish that the “client” can include any employee or elected official off the county.

With regard to whether KPERS staff or investment managers may be present in an executive session called pursuant to K.S.A. 75 – 4319(b)(2), K.S.A. 60-426 addresses the attorney client privilege and subsection (c) of that statute recognizes that this privilege may extend to staff or officials of a corporate client. K.S.A. 74-4903 creates the KPERS as “a body corporate. . . .” Thus, KPERS staff meet the definition of client. Such staff may therefore be permissibly present during an executive session without destroying the attorney-client privilege.

So the executive session was legal from the standpoint of falling within attorney/client privilege and our suggestion that the County Treasurer  wasn’t allowed in the meeting was based on a misunderstanding of whether Attorney Dan Meara was representing the Commissioners or the County. Since he is representing the County, any County employee or official can be present.

Special thanks to County Attorney Terri Johnson for taking the time to explain this and point out the section of the Attorney General’s Opinion.

Unpaid Taxes

On November 15th, we looked at some of the other forms of unpaid taxes in the county. I had a few people point out that some of the businesses listed with unpaid taxes have been sold and are owned by different owners now. So don’t stop supporting someone just because the business name is on the list. It might be the previous owners who didn’t remit their sales tax to the state.

Pool Update

Construction crews are making good progress on the pool. The first concrete was poured early this week. The black sheets in the photographs are a type of protective membrane that goes below the concrete and helps protect the pool from cracking.

City workers said that everything looks to be on schedule for opening the pool and Buck Run addition in Spring of 2012. Weather could delay the pouring of additional concrete, but once it is poured the rest of the construction should be able to go forward with little impact from the winter weather.