If you’ve driven by Espressly For You recently, you may have noticed the sign saying that it is closing. The good news is that the store has been purchased by Mike Giordano and he’ll be taking over on Tuesday February 20th.
Mr. Giordano is a Fort Scott local. He said they plan to be open from 6 to 2 and may consider staying open later for a dinner special on Wednesdays. Be sure to stop by and Welcome Mr. Giordano in his new endeavor.
Ron Estes will be at Buck Run on Friday at 8:30 am to talk about unclaimed property.
Today Dave Martin announced that Fort Scott won the Take Charge Challenge where communities competed to make energy efficient improvements. The award comes with a $100,000 grant that will be used to replace public lighting in Fort Scott with more efficient technology. Mr. Martin will be talking more about it on his Thursday morning radio program.
The Arcadia Christian Church held a cookout for the community on Friday evening. Organizers said they estimated 100 to 150 people came through during the evening. Hotdogs and marshmallows were cooked over the small fire and a grill helped keep a supply of food for those less skilled at cooking over the flames. Attendees were entertained by youngsters doing acapella Justin Bieber impersonations on a small sound system and a tractor and trailer provided hay rack rides.
Patty Love won our iPod Shuffle giveaway! We generated a random number from random.org and the number matched Patty’s email address in our list of subscribers.
I took Patty the iPod this morning. She was excited to win, said that now she has to figure out how to use it. She wasn’t too worried because she has a daughter who can help her.
Congratulations Patty! Enjoy your new iPod.
FortScott.biz will be doing some more giveaways in the next few months. Be sure to signup for our emails so you’ll be entered in the upcoming contests.
The winner of this contest has been contacted, but stay tuned for more giveaways.
FortScott.biz has a subscription option where you can get daily emails with all of the new stories for that day. To help bring more attention to this feature, we are giving away an iPod Shuffle to one subscriber. To sign up, all you have to do is to subscribe.
The contest will run until October 11th, 2011. Here are the rules:
Fort Scott Community College hosted a Home Energy Savings Workshop presented by Westar Energy on Tuesday night. The presentation looked at different ways to make homes more efficient and was followed by a workshop where attendees could practice applying caulk and foam. Attendees were given a packet containing a caulking gun, foam, weather stripping and other weatherizing supplies.
Some facts from the meeting:
According to the Association of Kansas County Treasurers, payments on overdue taxes are first applied to the most current tax bill.
If one wants to pay delinquent years Kansas State Law (KSA79-2401A) requires that the most current delinquent year be paid first. Example: If a homeowner had taxes owing for 1993, 1994, and 1995 the full amount for 1995 must be paid before payment for the 1994 etc., or of course, the homeowner can pay all the years at once. (source)
If true, this would mean that once you got behind on your taxes, you’d be required to pay everything you owe to keep the property from being sold at the sheriff’s sale. In other word’s you wouldn’t be able to be consistently behind on your taxes. Once you get behind you’d have to get completely caught up to prevent a sale.
I asked Susan Quick (Bourbon County Treasurer) about this and she said it didn’t sound right. She said, Bourbon County has always let people apply payments to any year. In some cases, people want to pay the current year first in order to keep their name out of the paper.
I read through KSA79-2401A a few times, but Terri Johnson (Bourbon County Attorney) was kind enough to take a look at it and explain it to me. It turns out that the Association of Kansas County Treasurers is in error. It appears they copied nearly word for word a section from the Johnson County website that says the same thing. They aren’t the only site to copy Johnson County. Linn County’s site says the same thing.
If you read through the statute, you’ll see that the Johnson County site is correct, but only for Johnson County. Everywhere else requires the payments to be applied to the oldest delinquent taxes.
It seems a little odd that there is a state law saying, “do X” but if you are in Johnson County “do the opposite of X.” I’m surprised it makes an exception to the opposite in one particular county. Terri Johnson pointed out that at some point in the past the law applied to both Johnson and Wyandotte counties, but Wyandotte was later removed. At this point it is unclear what was driving this difference in state law.
As far as Bourbon County goes, the law says that people can’t choose how to apply delinquent payments so the current policy should be changed. However, since the law basically says that people need to act in what is usually their own best interest, it is unlikely that the policy has had any significant variation from the law.
There was some updated information from the treasurer (Susan Quick) today. According to the auditor (Terry Sercer) the interest charged on overdue taxes is to be simple interest. Based on this change, many of the calculations in the previous articles on this site are inaccurate.
I also obtained a copy of the report on the last Tax Foreclosure Sale that was held January 27th 2010. The sale brought in $8,087.00 but cost $13,322.50 for a total loss of $5,235.50. However, an additional $68,342.34 was collected in taxes right before the sale. This means that even though money was lost on the sale itself, there were considerable funds collected from people who went ahead and paid taxes so the property wouldn’t be sold.
The $13,332.50 consists of the following charges:
Today Susan Quick said that she had rectified the situation with the 2005 taxes mentioned at the bottom of the previous article, by paying an additional $375.60 in interest and the ad fee of $17. Unfortunately, because of the way the software works, it won’t show up in the online tax website.
When I dropped by the court house this afternoon, Terry Sercer was sitting at a desk conducting the audit.
The second lake at Gunn Park is currently drained. The city is going to dig it out, but so far has been unable to get large equipment in there because it has been so wet. They will use the soil as topsoil for various projects and plan to put in some fishing piers before filling it back up.
Today there was a backhoe there digging a trench so any rain water will drain out and not prevent them from getting the equipment in there again. Their goal is to close the drain and let it fill back up sometime next year–probably in the fall of 2012.
The Fiber Initiative meeting on Friday was designed to look at how to get better Internet access in the Fort Scott area. Fort Scott is well behind many of the nearby cities. Here is a list of cities along with the highest bandwidth package available for residential users:
(thanks to Nick Graham for researching this)
In Fort Scott AT&T DSL offers up to a 7Mbps (download) / 768kbps (upload) connection while Suddenline tops out at 3Mbps/512kbps. In some places AT&T is only available at lower speeds and in many others it isn’t available at all.
Right now the only bandwidth on fiber optic cable that comes into Fort Scott comes from AT&T. The only alternative for people who need significant bandwidth is some form of wireless. This is what FSCC is using–a microwave link provided by Cox. Unfortunately these types of connections are not particularly reliable and they tend to cap out at much lower speeds than what can be achieved over fiber optic.
Suddenlink says they can do fiber runs in town that make use of the bandwidth they purchase from AT&T. It appears a 5 Mbps connection would cost around $1,300 per month. (For those of you in the meeting who heard me say that it would cost $3,000 per month, I mispoke and realized my error after consulting my notes from last year.) For comparison purposes the college is paying around $3,000 per month for a 45 Mbps connection and a significant portion of those costs are for KanREN network management services–the actual bandwidth is closer to $1,000 of that.
There are two basic problems. First, the limited bandwidth coming into Fort Scott is very expensive and only available from AT&T. The second problem has to do with actually getting bandwidth to the houses and smaller businesses.
To solve the first problem, we need to get more fiber running into Fort Scott. It appears that at least Cox and Quest have fiber runs that follow the railroad through Fort Scott, but there are no “junctions” so no one can tap into it here. The previous meeting was attended by Cox and there was discussion about trying to get a “junction” to allow businesses in Fort Scott to tap into the bandwidth from Cox. It sounds like the cost to dig up the fiber, put in a building with a junction, etc. would be roughly somewhere between $30k to $100k.
Larger cities have what is known as “carrier hotels” where anyone can buy bandwidth from multiple providers. This helps drive the price down because carriers can quote prices based on just the cost of bandwidth–not the cost of building out to various buildings. This type of arrangement also means there is more competition to drive down prices and allow companies that need redundant connections the ability to easily provision connections to multiple carriers. The client is then responsible for getting the bandwidth to their datacenter or office. The clients in this type of setup would be ISPs and larger companies that can afford the build out to move the data from the “carrier hotel” to wherever it is needed. Fort Scott needs to be able to get reasonably price bandwidth into the city before it is going to be cost effective to provide reasonably priced bandwidth to individuals and businesses in the area.
Better bandwidth to Fort Scott from multiple carriers could make the city a more attractive place to put datacenters, call centers and other bandwidth intense businesses.
The second problem has to do with how to get the bandwidth to the individuals and businesses. This is often refered to as the “last mile” problem. The two big players in this market with wired connections are AT&T and Suddenlink. RTS and Valnet offer some wireless connections in and around Fort Scott.
AT&T DSL service only works with wire lengths less than about 14,000 feet from the central office. While this seems like a long distance in Fort Scott, wire doesn’t go in a straight line and wasn’t originally installed to minimize the distance back. Also older infrastructure often can’t support the needs of DSL. There are many situations where one person has a good DSL connection, but their neighbor across the street can’t get service. In repeated calls to AT&T it does not appear that they are interested in building additional infrastructure in Fort Scott to support better connectivity to homes. (Although they may change their mind with pressure from someone other than me calling in as an end user.)
Suddenlink says they plan to eventually support 10 Mbps connections in Fort Scott, but doesn’t have a timeline for any upgrades. When I spoke with them in August 2010, they said they might start offering a premium tier in the first half of 2011. It sounds like they are hesitant to increase the bandwidth because their current network design within Fort Scott, is not adequate to handle the existing traffic much less traffic that would come if their speeds were greater. Suddenlink says that 50% of the Fort Scott traffic in the evenings is from Netflix. Interestingly they have their max bandwidth right below what it would need to be for HD Netflix streaming which would consume significantly more bandwidth.
From a technical perspective of what is possible, DSL typically maxes out at about 15Mbps while normal cable modems can typically support speeds up to 50 Mbps. (There are all kinds of different technologies to make this go faster, so I’m talking about typical networks with typical equipment.) Suddenlink does have some networks where they have 50Mbps and even 107Mbps connections. However, it appears that they only offer this in markets where they are trying to match speed with competition. AT&T DSL coverage is spotty enough that it doesn’t seem to be a big competitive driver.
The places that are offering extremely high speed connections are doing it with fiber. Google is planning to offer 1000Mbps connections in Kansas City in the near future. The price hasn’t been set, but it will probably be $30 to $70 per month. Chattanooga offers a 1000Mbps connection for $350 per month. They also have a 50Mbps plan that is priced in the same range as Fort Scott’s options.
I think the current plan is to come up with a plan for where the city wants to be at certain points in time and then see if the current providers are interested in helping to implement it. For example, here are some very rough ideas of possible targets from looking at what other cities are doing:
In 1 Year:
In 5 Years:
In 10 Years:
Keep in mind, this isn’t a plan that is being proposed, it is just my quick attempt to demonstrate what a plan could look like.
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