Here is a PDF of the payment plan contracts requested from the Bourbon County Treasurer under the Kansas Open Records Act.. This information is part of public records and no one is allowed to use it to try to sell things to people whose information is contained in this document.
“No person shall knowingly sell, give or receive, for the purpose of selling or offering for sale any property or service to persons listed therein, any list of names and addresses contained in or derived from public records…” K.S.A. 45-230(a).
The link is below:
PDF of Payment Plan Contracts
It is about 10 megs and over 100 pages, so it may take a little while to download. It is possible that a few pages didn’t scan correctly. I was billed for 143 pages, but the final count in the scanned document was 140, so there may have been a few errors in the scanning process. I haven’t gone back and counted each page.
Update 9/26: I have gone back through and located the pages that double scanned and added them to the document. There are now a total of 148 contracts. Let me stress that the scanning error occured on my side of things–not the county. I apologize for any confusion that was caused by this. If you downloaded the PDF, your version is out of date if it has fewer than 148 pages.
Keep in mind that anyone could make partial payments on the amount they owed with or without any type of plan. The payment plan tried to help keep money coming in for the county by getting people to make smaller regular payments. It mistakenly allowed people to keep their name out of the paper as well. However, the payment plan shouldn’t have changed the amount anyone paid–it just gave them a way to keep track of it and try to help guide people toward getting the delinquent amounts paid off.
There are a lot of documents here, but some thoughts from initially scanning through them:
- Why are most of them unsigned? – Update 9/26: The treasurer said that many people didn’t send them back signed.
- Why are some of the payment terms for longer than one year? I thought the payment plan let people pay things off in a single year because anything longer would just put people more and more behind.
- The monthly payments seem very “round”. Were they just based on what people said they could pay?
- In at least one case, the payment plan was used to pre-pay on the following years taxes.