The county is getting ready to send out tax statements to property owners. Joanne Long said that the county sends out over 15,000 tax statements. Some properties have two statements–one that goes to the mortgage holder and one to the property owner. Property owners should see the statements sometime in the next week or so.
The taxes can also be viewed online by following this link. Type in your last name, push “find now” and then click on the “current taxes” link.
There was some discussion of the getting a crane to help move crusher equipment at the rock quarry. Commissioner Coleman said that when he was working with cranes they always tried to oversize the crane by 5x of whatever they are trying to lift. The commissioners were going to check to see just how much the equipment that needs to be moved weighs.
There will be no commission meeting on Friday due to the holiday. There will be no commission meeting on Monday due to the Kansas Association of Counties annual conference.
A citizen came in to talk to the commissioners about a large rock that bent up the A-arm and stabilizer from bottom of his car last Tuesday when he hit it and it drug him over into the ditch. The commissioners and county clerk gave him a form to fill out for the county insurance company.
Two citizens, John Scott & Curt Shankel, were updating the advisory committee for the new sewer district. The sewer system should be operational by the end of the month. They are asking that the committee be kept in the loop particularly in matters related to the price increases. They discussed how to keep things fair if people want to connect to the district in the future. The commissioners based a motion to recognize the advisory committee in an advisory capacity.
The commissioners passed a motion to close the landfill on Saturday when there is a holiday that falls on a Monday or Friday.
The Mayor of Redfield, Gary Judd, came to talk to the commissioners about an alleged stalker / peeping tom. He said that citizens have started arming themselves and walking the streets at night. The other evening two citizens were out with a baseball bat and shotgun. He was concerned that some of the people arming themselves “shouldn’t even have a gun.” He said the sheriff’s department is doing the best they can do, but he was still concerned that someone was going to get hurt.
Allegedly someone broke into an individual’s home, watched her sleep, and kidnapped her from a convenience store. The review of the tapes from the convenience store doesn’t seem to support that.
He said there was a city council meeting tonight where the issue is going to be discussed.
The Commissioners suggested that he talk with the sherrif. The Mayor said he had tried, but no one called him back. He felt like the person at the front desk was interrogating him. He said that if there was anything Redfield could do to work with the sheriff’s department, they would be very willing.
The Mayor came back after talking with the sheriff and said he and the sheriff were both questioning the validity of the allegations, but that the sheriff’s department was helping the town with the issue.
The commissioners are meeting with the road and bridge crew at 7 am, November 9th at the county barn to discuss the move to a new quarry.
There will be a job fair held at the FSCC Danny & Willa Ellis Fine Arts Center on Thursday, November 10th from 10am to 2pm. If you are looking for a job, put it on your calendar. If you know of anyone looking for a job, please let them know about it.
The flyer lists six companies that will be at the fair:
There are over 20 positions listed. You can download the flyer from here: Job Fair Flyer – Fall 2011
Fort Scott will have a new petstore called Everything Pets. The new petstore will be next door to the gas station at 6th and National.
Owner, Dawn Bryant, plans to open next Saturday on November 12th. A variety of birds, hamsters and guinea pigs have already taken up residence in cages and are waiting for opening day.
The new store will fill a void left by the closing of Pets n Pets a few months ago.
Members of Fort Scott Disc Gunners took advantage of the warmer weather late Friday afternoon to play some disc golf in Gunn Park.
The Gunn Park disc golf course was originally installed with 9 “holes” in 1999 and in more recent years has been upgraded to 18 holes. Most have a regular and alternate location and they are regularly shifted between these positions to add variety. The course length varies between 4908 ft. and 6375 ft. depending on the configuration.
Here is a screenshot of the 2005 property taxes for a local business. Half of this amount should have been due on December 20th 2005 and the other half on May 10th 2006. Since the taxes weren’t paid, they should have been published in October 2006 which would have started the redemption period. For non-homestead property that would have been 24 months.
So the property should have been at any Sheriff’s sale that occurred after October of 2008. However, the taxes were not paid until March of 2010. Was there no tax sale from October 2008 until some point after March of 2010? The Bourbon County website lists a 2009 tax sale list, but this property was not included. According to the Commission minutes, there was a tax sale held January 27th, 2010.
When I asked Treasurer wasn’t sure why this property wasn’t on the sale and she didn’t recall any reason why it was held off. It is important to note that there are many stages that property goes through before being listed on a sale and it is entirely possible that it was submitted as property for sale, from the Treasurer’s office but held out based on other criteria.
If there was a reason why the property was held off the tax sale, was the interest calculated correctly? The interest rate for 2005 taxes was 7%. The total amount owed would incurred interest from May 20th 2006 until March 22nd, 2010 or 46 months and two days. Half of the amount would have incurred interest from December 10th, 2005 until May 20th, 2006 or 5 months 10 days. If we round the time to just months the total comes to $7,116.29 in interest. There should have been another $15 or so in fees as well.
According to Susan Porter, who used to work in the Treasurer’s office, the system we are looking at here, has a safe guard against accepting incorrect interest. It requires that you manually over-ride the interest.
When this is entered to actually pay the tax on the tax payment screen the only way for the interest or penalty to be changed or removed is a manual override or to back date the payment calendar date. Until this is done the correct amount of interest and penalties are calculated correctly. ~ Susan Porter source
If this is correct, then someone would have needed to intentionally marked the amount as complete even though the system was showing there was still around $900 owed. I asked the Treasurer the discrepancy could be due to the way that the amortization schedule works. In other words if part of the taxes owed were paid early on, those taxes would no longer be accuring interest. So it is possible the taxes were calculated correctly, but since the date of each payment doesn’t show up on the public website, it is hard to tell.
Interestingly this particular company does have a payment plan that was setup in 2010. They own just under $30,000. The payment plan states that they will pay $2,000 per month from April 20, 2011 until May 20, 2012. This only comes to $28,000 which is about $2,000 less than what they owe without factoring in the interest.
According to Mr. Sercer, he was told that the payment plans were based on an amortization schedule produced by the old computer system and that sometimes it came up with “crazy” interest rates. The Treasurer confirmed that this was likely what had happened in this situation. It seems very odd that it would generate a completely even number that doesn’t even add up to the full amount much less include interest.
The problem isn’t so much that the property wasn’t sold. Obviously it is better if the taxes are paid. However, if a property doesn’t have the threat of being sold, it is possible for other payments to become the priority.
Is it possible that simply following the timelines specified for selling delinquent property would have encouraged enough payments to have made the past mill levy increase unnecessary?
Fort Scott has a reasonable number of choices for internet access. Here is a list of what is available depending on exactly where you live.
That looks like quite a few options, but they all have one thing in common. They all get their bandwidth to Fort Scott from AT&T. So while there can be a certain amount of competition in how to connect your home, there is no competition in the underlying resource–access to the Internet.
Does this lack of competition drive the price up in Fort Scott? For comparison, I have a server in downtown Kansas City. For $50 per month I can get a 100 Mbps connection to the Internet. This would be enough bandwidth to let a local ISP supply reasonable service to a large number of customers. Now we’d expect that it would cost more to get a connection like that in Fort Scott than in Kansas City, but how much more? If it would cost 20 times more that would be $1,000 per month. Obviously that is more than what you’d want to put in your house, but it wouldn’t be out of reach for a business–particularly an ISP.
When I talked to AT&T about getting a connection like that, the initial price started out at around $39,266 per month. With a long contract and a special they were running, the price would come down to $31,333. After talking with a few different people, it sounded like there might be a way to cut that in half and get down to the $15,000 range. Still that is 300 times what bandwidth costs in downtown Kansas City. Could you imagine if your electric or telephone bill cost 300 times more than it costs in a larger city? Instead of a $90 per month electric bill, it would cost you $27,000 pre month. Instead of a $32 per month phone bill, it would cost $9,600.
If you were starting a business that required a reliable high speed connection to the Internet, would you go to the town where it costs $50 per month or the town where it costs $15,000? The future of small towns like Fort Scott is going to be very closely tied to their ability to tap into reliable inexpensive bandwidth. As long as everything comes through a single provider, there is no competition to drive the price down. Right now, no matter how many new ISPs start up in town, they are are all going to be reselling bandwidth from the same expensive source.
If Fort Scott wants to be competitive in the future, we are going to need to find ways to get competitively priced bandwidth into the city.
Construction is proceeding rapidly on the new pool. In three weeks the old structure has been removed and workers are currently digging out additional dirt for the new pool. As expected they have hit rock and are using a jack hammer on a backhoe to break it up.
Construction workers said that once they get everything dug out, they will lay in the drain line and then start pouring concrete. So far everything is on schedule. Weather is the biggest unknown and a large rain could significantly slow things down.
Harvest Ministries owns the old Western building down town. In November of 2009, the Tribune ran a story about plans to turn it into a medical facility and television studio. There was also a story by KOAM. In January of this year, the Tribune reported that the president of Harvest Ministries had been indicted on charges of fraud bankruptcy fraud.
Despite claiming innocence back in January Paul and Charolette House have both plead guilty to the charges according to eMissourian.
Apparently Mr. House pastored a church and he directed them to pay his salary to Harvest Ministries instead of to him directly. He then claimed he was not employed for bankruptcy and disability purposes while Harvest Ministries funneled the salary back into his personal accounts.
The county tax search shows that Harvest Ministries owns the property at 8 1st Street and 14 1st Street. There are outstanding taxes due on the properties of around $45,000 dating back to 2006.
With the Paul and Charolette House waiting to be sentenced early next year, it seems unlikely that there will be any plans to do anything with the building in the near future if ever. It is possible that the county could sell the properties at the upcoming tax auction, but it may be difficult to find someone with a plan and the financing to do something with those buildings.
The County Attorney came in to discuss some issues related to the sewer district and moving a grinder pump. There was a discussion the best way to get electricity setup for a antenna on top of a water tower.
Jim Harris with Barry Tractor came in to discuss bids for rock crusher equipment.
Saturday a new store opened downtown at 118 E Wall Street. Cowboys Like Us is a western wear and equipment store that caters to the needs of cowboy/cowgirls. The store is owned by Chelse and Yance Day who are students at the Juco. Fiance Cassie Johnson and mother Sherry Day also help run the store.
Cowboys Like Us carries a large selection of new and used equipment and clothing and name brands like Chinch, Stetson, and Serratelli. They also have rodeo equipment like helmets, vests, ropes, goat strings and tack supplies.
The goal for the store is to give people a way to shop local without needing to go to Kansas City or Pittsburg. In addition to the new goods, the store also takes used items on consignment. Cassie Johnson said, “It’s good to have consignment items for college kids” because it helps keep the cost down and provides an outlet to sell equipment that is no longer needed.
They are working on setting up a Cowboy Wall Of Fame to help highlight local rodeo heroes.
Cowboys Like Us is open Monday through Saturday from 10am to 6pm. Be sure to stop in and show your support for Fort Scott’s newest local business.
When Paul Feeney and his wife got to town last week to begin their project of turning the old middle school into a family entertainment location they found that the building wasn’t in the same condition they had left it. Vandals had broken in and gone through smashing most of the glass and spraying graffiti all over the walls. The floors were covered with broken glass and broken light bulbs.
There were quite a few things stolen as well including a nice weight machine and various equipment and tools. Many of the kitchen appliances were damaged and broken. The vandals located some of the paint that had been stored by the previous owners and poured it out on the floor. A toilet had been pulled out of one of the rooms and thrown from the balcony in the auditorium.
Security cameras captured video of many of the miscreants and the police department is working on locating them.
All in all, it was a less than idea welcome to Fort Scott. Mr. Feeney said he briefly wondered if buying the building had been a big mistake, but after a few days of cleaning up the damage he is excited about the plans for the electric go-carts and other entertainment for the citizens of Fort Scott.
He still anticipates that the initial attractions should be opening in 2 or 3 years. The go carts will probably be put on the ground floor and the gym is the likely location for a climbing wall and possibly an indoor skateboard half-pipe.
He and his wife plan to live in the building and the tower in the center will be turned into an apartment with roof access and a great view of the city. Mr. Feeney said once he gets the glass cleaned up, his first priority is making sure the building is ready for winter and fixing any leaks in the roof that might lead to bigger problems later on. He said over all, the structure of the building seems pretty sound, but the roof has some leaks that need addressed–particularly in the center tower.
Another thing he is working on is getting a good inventory of what is actually in the building. He has found some unexpected surprises. There are a great number of what appears to be ceramic molds in what was once the cafeteria. It isn’t clear if those were put there by a previous owner or if they were part of the school. In a dark corner of the basement there are a number of canisters that appear to be rations and supplies from the cold war era.
The go carts that are planned for the building run on electric rechargeable batteries. Mr. Feeney expects the carts alone will cost somewhere around $200,000. He said his goal for the carts is to bring in enough to cover their operational costs and he is expecting to have a very hefty electric bill once things get going. He is less concerned about them bringing in enough to make money or even recover his initial investment.
Beyond the vandalism, there building has been left sitting for quite some time and is going to take some significant work. It appears that some previous owner may have removed much of the wiring to sell for scrap metal and the sump pumps in the boiler room haven’t been working so there is several feet of water in that area. There are many areas where the paint is peeling from the walls and plaster is falling off.
Despite all the work that is needed, Mr. Feeney’s enthusiasm is contagious and it is hard not to fall in love with the old building. Their goal of turning the school into an entertainment venue is going to require a lot of work, but it will be a great asset to the Fort Scott area and hopefully can serve as a model of what other communities can do with their large old buildings.
