Cass County Commission - Regular Meeting

Okay, we're going to go ahead and call the Friday, May 26th, 22nd, 9 o'clock, public meeting for Resolution 2650, Commission meeting to order at this time. Roll call, please, Kathy. Bob Houston. Present. Mike Moreland. Here. Jeff White. Present. Okay, this morning we're going to open the microphone for any public comment on the quarter cent sales tax that should be approved today and put on the ballot for the August election. So at this time, any public comments, not a question and answer, it's a public comment forum. If you'd like to speak, please be able to sign in, state your name when you come up to the microphone, and you're allowed to talk and speak wherever you'd like to at the commission at this time.

Good morning, Commissioners. My name is Scott Howe. I live at 9200 East 201st Street. I'm also one of the Mount Pleasant Township Special Road District Commissioners. I am going to state my questions. I understand you're not going to answer them, but I think they should be entered on the record, as well as make some comments. A resident of the county and the district that I feel needed the answer before I could ever vote for this would be what effect on Mount Pleasant Township Special Road District would this have? It appears we will pay both taxes while only receiving tax money from property taxes. The sales tax will go 100% to the county. The county also is currently taking a total of 21% of the property tax money from the district, 20% to the commission, 1% as a collector's fee. Why has this been rushed through what appears to be very quickly as a voter and a constituent? This seems to be very quick. In fact, the put it on the ballot was within an hour with all of the wording from a work session. Usually work sessions clearly were going on. Things were being done prior to the actual work session that needed to be done for public. At that work session, Commissioner Fletcher did say he hoped the voters would trust the commissioners. I would ask, why would anyone trust blindly? Trust but verify, I love that quote, but more information is needed. He also said that, He personally would never vote for a property tax rate increase for Mount Pleasant Township Special Road District because he's a resident of Belden in that area. And that right there explains 100% of the problem we are facing at that road district. We are outnumbered three to four to one. County residents, I live in unincorporated Cass County. We drive on some of the worst roads, or actually the worst roads. My neighborhood was forced to create a neighborhood improvement district to fix our roads because the county failed us and the road district failed us. That cost every property owner there $1,500 to $1,600 per year additional property tax to pay that bond off. Now you want us to pay additional taxes. Then as far as sales taxes, I'm not a fan of raising sales taxes anyway. They are Lower income and working class families. When you have a family to feed, you have to buy your groceries, you have to buy clothes for your kids. You have no choice but to spend that money that you don't have. And now you want to make them pay more money. While it will benefit large landowners, people with property values that are higher property values, myself would be included if the road district went away, it would benefit me. But that doesn't make it right. Also, the large landowners, businesses, and higher income people would benefit from this type of tax as opposed to the property tax. Thank you.

Thank you, Scott. The mic is still open if anyone else would like to speak.

My name is Dallas Register, and I felt I ought to be saying something because I didn't want to disappoint you. Anyway, the special road and bridge tax that's referenced on the agenda, is that the capital tax? Where did that come from?

It's not a question and answer. I'm not sure what you're talking about, though, on that, Dallas.

Well, on the agenda, it's identified that you're going to swap out the road and bridge special property tax for the sales tax. And I was just wondering where that or what property tax you're referring to on that special tax.

Once again, it's public comment. If you want to catch me after the meeting, I'd be more than happy to talk to you about that.

Okay, so you're not going to answer questions on this one either? It's public comment, Dallas. All right. The other thing is, following up with the previous gentleman, I've lived in Cass County for 40-some years now, and I really haven't seen any attempt to improve the quality of the county roads. Now it's easy to criticize, but there's one particular example that within a half a mile of my house, there's a curve that for years, every time you had the toad strangler, water would wash across the road into the ditch on the other side. And so I contacted, I think it was Terry at the time, that all they needed to do was to redo the ditch on the far side of the road and divert the water into the inlet to the drain that ran under the road at that point. And it saved a considerable amount of money on gravel and operator time and equipment expense. Here in the last two or three years, that ditch is filled in and now the water is running across the road again and the favorite method for repairing or maintaining roads is to throw gravel and operator time at it when all they have to do is to recut that ditch back in there to get it to go to the right place. That's just one example. And years ago I checked within a couple miles of my house, and about 20-25% of the drains that ran under the road were impaired with debris, which caused every time you had a toad strangle, the water would run across the road and then you'd have to throw gravel at it again instead of getting off of the breaker. pulling that debris out there so that the water could flow under there and probably save considerable money in time and gravel. Anyway, I'm not an expert on road maintenance, by any means. From what I understand, one comment on Facebook was that there's almost zipped training for the road equipment operators. And so apparently there's something needs to be done. As a resident I would like to see a formal program because they've been cutting these secondary ditches in there for time immemorial and we know what they do and the standard county road is 24 feet wide and we'd be hard pressed to find many particularly gravel roads in Cass County that are full 24 feet wide, and have the four-foot ditches on both sides. And ditches are as important to road maintenance as is crowning them. And like I said, it's taken decades for roads to get into this condition that they are now. In some cases, the road is actually lower than the Ditch should be to carry the water off of that road But there's to me there's there's a way to to approach this and it's just business as usual and I think you owe it to the people of Cass County and to yourselves To come up with a formal program to improve the quality of the roads in Cass County And I think that would, if we're talking about economic development and making good impressions on people, the quality of the roads do not make a good impression on a lot of people. Thank you. Thank you, Devin.

Good morning. My name is Michael Johnston. I live at 19407 South Cleveland Avenue. I didn't really actually come here to say anything, but I felt like I needed to point out the same thing that Scott did about the possibility of Mount Pleasant paying a double tax for the roads that we have. I'd like to know more detail about that. You know, in fact, being obviously because of the 50-year Mount Pleasant Township's lifespan has decreased terribly. The roads are very, very bad, but I didn't come here to speak out about certain roads. My point is that I'd like to see the county truly consider taking this over because it's county roads, it's the highest roads population area in the county. It's the highest traveled of these roads going especially east and west into Kansas, out of Kansas, a number of things. And I don't expect, I would not expect that to happen overnight as to all of these things being repaired. Although I think that for the sake of the roads, the county, and the people that use them on a daily basis, which As you know, I assume you're thinking about this because of what you're trying to do here, but I believe that if this does pass, I don't see it passing. I hope it does, because maybe that will give you the incentive to help us out a little bit more there and get things right the way the county...

Good morning. I'm Herschel Young. I live on 2 Highway 17100 if anybody wants to know. I work up in Mount Pleasant all the time. Right now I'm in the middle of doing a project up there for four clients up there. And it's like pulling teeth to even get a response from Mount Pleasant. I don't see how one small section of the county should affect the rest of the county on this quarter cent sales tax. One of two things is going to happen here. You're going to have to raise our levy for the road and bridge to come up with the money, or we can spread it out where everybody that comes through here, Kansas, Iowa, everybody that stops here and everything can help pay for some of this expense. I'm 100% for the quarter cent sales tax to replace the road and bridge. I proposed this myself back in 2010-2011. It is the best way, I believe, to keep up with what the county needs. Addressing the issues of the county employees' days and not knowing what they are doing and everything. It's wages. We became a training center over the last 30 years. We train them. They go to the city, make $20 or $15 to $20, $30 an hour more. Travis has been here three years now? Two. He's the first man that ever told me I needed a permit. He answers his calls when I call him about something. I have utmost respect for you. Have we bumped heads? Lots. But he explains what's going on. He don't just say, that's the way that's got to be. We need the money for wages, gravel, and maintenance and everything. A lot of people don't understand. You've got to get maintenance done before you can improve. You can't improve until you get the maintenance done. If you improve, you've got to keep the maintenance up. Chip and seal works great. If you have a good base. If you don't have a good base, you might as well just throw your money away. I'm here to tell you right now, I like spreading responsibility around to everybody. I don't care if it's somebody making 50 cents an hour or somebody making 50 billion dollars an hour. If it's a sales tax, every time they spend their money, The county's going to benefit, the citizens are going to benefit. The richer you are, the more money you spend, the more taxes you spend. It's that simple. Everybody coming through, in my opinion, this is the most economical way to fund this and the most responsible way. I support your suggestion on increasing the gentleman's wages so we can retain the better operators and everything. And I see it firsthand. I travel these roads, all these roads, more than almost anybody here. Pretty safe. And it is, sadly, every time something happens and I spot it, I send him a pin and a location of something that needs to be addressed. Me, I want to address everybody out here for a second. Let these guys know if there's a problem. Don't complain, don't harass them, but let them know, because if they don't know, they can't fix it. When there's a rain, Mother Nature wins these battles. I fight it all the time taking care of my clients' driveways, and their ditches, and their drainage issues. And I'm just doing it on a small scale. Counties that fight in massive amounts of roads. I don't have the exact number. It's like 7,200 miles? We've got 1,000 miles.

1,000 miles of road.

1,000 miles? Okay. Of county road. Okay. But that's huge time, expense, and everything. So... Gentlemen, all I got to say is you got my support and I thank you for actually stepping up and doing something proactive instead of reactive and just letting us keep going down the rabbit hole. Thank you.

Thank you, Herschel. The microphone's still open if anyone else would like to comment about the public comment portion of Resolution 2650.

Good morning. Hugh Spence. I live about five miles northwest of here, northeast of here. A couple of points I'd like to make. I feel like the responsibility for the success or failure of this proposal rests with you all. I want to be able to buy into this thing, kind of like if I'm buying a new piece of equipment or a different truck or something. I don't want to be sold. I think you all have the responsibility to present the necessary facts, the rationale, and why you think this is the appropriate thing to do. I attended the work session. I think that was good as far as it went. I would have liked to see more detail. I'd like to see more attendance here because if you're on social media, it's a pretty popular topic right now, but it seems like there's a lot of talk and not much action. I know we've got a pretty good website, but I think the default answer of that information is available, is good, but you're not going to get the job done that way. Social media is a fact of life. I think the county needs to step up a little bit. I tried this morning, but my printer failed and I'm not as slick with my cell phone as some others are. So I'll do the plebeian notes, pen and notes here. But I think the transparency The communication has got to come up a notch or two. How you do it, that's up to you. You guys are in charge. I'm sure you can get some thoughts. I like the idea of the person in charge of road and bridge being here. I talked to him briefly, hadn't met him before. Seems like a solid. I think there is a complaint line. I don't know. That in itself is a failure. I would hope it would be an action line. Talk to Travis. You get an answer. You may not get instant action, but not everybody can do that. I think you're peeing into the wind is what you're doing here. The statistics of voters in this county are against you. Roughly There's about 80-odd thousand registered voters in the county, in Cass County. 63,000 of those, approximately, according to Google, are in cities. In the county, you got about 18,000. References back to my very first comment. Success or failure of this is gonna be on your ability to get people to buy in. I hope you take that to heart. I don't wanna get into the road Technology stuff, as I said, I got plenty of compliments from Travis. I think we're getting wrapped up a little bit in this Mount Pleasant issue. I wasn't really aware of it. Did a little research, asked a few questions. I think they got what they wanted initially. I think it was four years ago or something. And now things have changed. Belton City limits have expanded. They don't care about Mount Pleasant, et cetera, et cetera. I think the county needs to deal with it, but I do think it's a separate issue. I may be right, I may be wrong. That's one man's opinion. As far as the actual sales tax, I believe in a tax where the user pays. Gasoline tax to fund roads makes sense. If you don't drive a car, don't buy gas, you don't use the roads, maybe a bicycle. That's appropriate in my opinion. Sales tax may be regressive, but it's also the broadest base tax you can get. Everybody's into it. Everybody understands. Everybody knows. Road and bridge, I think there's third or fourth on where our property taxes go via the amount of mill levy. 80% of our taxes go to schools. And in one way or another, we all use them. I've been in the county 44 years, I think, now. And I never had a child or grandchild in school. But I shuck out several thousand bucks every year in taxes. So I think I've got a right to speak my mind about that. And... People coming through here using the roads and then heading on, they don't pay any property tax. They will pay a sales tax if they stop. I think retail is a growing area. More and more people want to buy stuff. I think taxing it makes sense. For what it's worth, that's where I'm at. Thank you.

Is there anyone else who'd like to speak? Can I comment again? One time, that's all you get. Catch me. Catch me after me and I'll talk you down. Okay, no further comments? Okay, at this time we're going to close the public comment portion for resolution 2650. Any discussion, gentlemen? Do I have a motion? So moved. Second. So all in favor of resolution 2650? Aye. Three votes for, zero against. Resolution 2650 passes. Motion to adjourn. So moved. Second. All in favor?