ROBERT PIERCE
• Leader & Times
Approval of the budget for Seward County’s upcoming fiscal year will take a little longer after commissioners heard from some local constituents at Tuesday’s Revenue Neutral Rate public hearing.
Chairman Scott Carr opened the hearing for audience members to come to the podium and voice their concerns. First to speak was county resident Justin Alexander, who said his property taxes have gone up about 21.5 percent in the last three years, and with the county potentially exceeding the RNR for this year, they could go up even more.
“I’ve looked at the valuation notice you guys sent out, and based on that and what I calculated, I should be pushing somewhere around a 30 percent increase in the last four years on my property,” Alexander said. “To me, that seems pretty extravagant.”
Alexander said many businesses have attorneys fighting to keep their taxes down, saying many common citizens do not have this option.
“We get the opportunity, but none of us are going to go out and hire this high powered attorneys to try to get our taxes dropped down $500 or $1,000 a year,” he said. “My concern is if we have to pay, why do they not have to pay? Why does all this money get trickled down to the common taxpayer who lives in this community and not the businesses kicking in their part of it?”
Administrator April Warden said county valuation has to be verified to the county clerk’s office by July 20, and with the county’s budget hearing process not being done at that time, County Clerk Stacia Long had to be notified of the intent to exceed the RNR.
“When we did that, because we had not had the hearings yet, all the Revenue Neutral notices everybody received were at the worst case scenario,” Warden said. “When budgets were presented to the county commissioners from department heads plus outside entities we fund, we would’ve been looking at a 22 to 24 mill increase. The commissioners had to go through that.”
Warden said commissioners looked at potential cuts and where increases would have to be made, all the while utilizing part of the county’s cash reserve to continue to be fiscally responsible.
“When those Revenue Neutral notices went out, they went out as a 20-mill increase,” she said. “In the certified budget that was publicized, they’re looking at a 7.985-mill increase. It is not the 20 mills that went out to the taxpayers in the Revenue Neutral notice.”
County resident Kyle Hayes, who also owns property in the Oklahoma Panhandle, said his taxes for that property do not compare to those he pays in Seward County.
“I’ve got close to 1,500 acres I pay taxes on in Oklahoma in Texas, Cimarron and Beaver counties,” he said. “That is ridiculous. It is beyond belief to me I can have all that ground down there and not even come close to the amount of taxes I pay right here in Seward County for just 65 acres.”
Resident Rachel Strickland, whose family owns land in Liberal and Seward County, said her yearly tax bill for the county is unbelievable.
“We’ve been hit by inflation and raising taxes just like everyone else,” she said. “You guys are expecting us to find more money to pay taxes when it takes almost a month’s worth of grocery budget to go to the grocery store one time. I understand we need good roads. I’m all for good roads. I’m for good bridges, good water, good sewer system, good infrastructure. I understand that, and I think we’re all paying enough that we can have that.”
Strickland said she understands the need to update machinery and increasing prices, but she felt the county was putting a large tax load on its citizens.
“I think you need to stop thinking about tax more and tax more and start living within your means like we have to live within our means,” she said.
Marlin Meisenheimer too said taxes continue to increase, and he asked when enough would be enough, including how much the county charges for car tags.
“You buy a new car,” he said. “The tags are completely ridiculous for a new tag on a new car. How many years does it take to get it down?”
Meisenheimer said incomes are limited, but taxes continue to get higher.
“When they want something, what’s the first thing they think of – raise the tax,” he said. “These guys will pay it. Is that fair? Something’s got to change. There’s got to be an alternative somewhere, someway to keep it down.”
Carr said some of the county’s needs are long overdue.
“We look at roads and bridges,” he said. “We do like nice roads. None of our blacktops have been touched for 10, 15 years. They’re falling apart. If we don’t fix them now, we’ve got to go back to dirt roads. Last year, we did increase the money to Road and Bridge and this year as well. That’s probably a four-mill increase between the two years.”
Carr said along with taxes, expenses such as postage, fuel, electricity and water are going up as well.
“We’re getting ready for our tax sale,” he said. “That’s another $50,000 increase to the county. The other taxing entities will benefit from that. Hopefully, we can recoup most of that cost. We’re trying to do rebuilds on heavy equipment at the county, at Road and Bridge, at the landfill. We are trying to save money.”
Carr said Oklahoma taxes are lower due to the differences in the amount of services between there and in Seward County.
“With EMS, a lot of times, Beaver County calls us to be the primary call,” he said. “That’s not fair to you, the taxpayer, living in Seward County. There’s other services like that, and it’s always going to be cheaper across the state line.”
Warden said some county residents tag their vehicles in Oklahoma and Texas, adding if those vehicles were tagged in Kansas, it would help local taxpayers. She and Commissioner C.J. Wettstein asked what services constituents wanted to cut from the budget.
“It is a very fine line on what we do cut,” Wettstein said. “Most of the buildings the county has bought off the tax rolls, I voted against buying them. The biggest problem we’re doing is we’re buying buildings, and then we take them off the tax roll.”
Carr and Warden said the county is mandated by the state to provide some of its services, including Road and Bridge, EMS, fire, law enforcement, administrative services for tags and taxes, appraisals and a register of deeds.
“If your county does not provide the service, you are responsible for funding an agency for mental health, disabilities, juvenile detention and community corrections,” Warden said. “With District Court, they are a state agency, but we are mandated to fund them in our judicial district in our county. Another thing you guys pay for is K-State Research and Extension. We don’t have control over setting everyone’s budget. While we’re talking about a Revenue Neutral Rate for our taxing subdivision, a lot of the issues many of you have brought up are not under county jurisdiction.”
Warden said each of the taxing subdivisions the county distributes money to is facing the same challenges as the county, and she added some of the buildings taken off tax rolls were not county buildings.
“We didn’t make the decision to take those particular buildings off of the tax rolls that were mentioned up here,” she said.
Warden said decisions made by those subdivisions, including Seward County Community College, the City of Liberal, fire departments with both the city and county, library districts and cemetery districts factor into a taxpayers’s statement and the amount of tax they are paying.
“The county collects that, but we distribute that money out to all of those taxing subdivisions,” she said. “That’s not just the county’s money.”
Later in the hearing, Warden pointed to the cost of equipment increasing.
“A road grader three years ago cost us $295,000,” she said. “A road grader right now, if we can even get one because a lot of times, you can’t even get one in the same year you need one, is twice that amount of money. We’re paying just under $500,000 for a road grader now. Trash trucks, we can’t even get them in the same year we need them. We ordered an ambulance in 2023 that’ll be delivered in 2025.”
Warden said new vehicles are rarely seen in the county’s budget, with law enforcement being the exception, and she said those vehicles are reutilized.
Resident Brad Beer said even the just less than eight-mill increase is huge for some.
“This is some people’s medicine for the month,” he said. “Everybody in this room is on a fixed income at some point or another. This can be critical to some people.”
A big concern for many in the past year has been county roads, and some on hand for Tuesday’s meeting said they had concerns about out of state work trucks damaging those roads. Warden said, though, those trucks are benefitting the local economy.
“A lot of those silage trucks are running product from our farmers who are making a living to our economic development base, whether it be Heifer Source, the ethanol plant, Cobalt, the dairy,” she said.
Warden said commissioners clearly did not have an easy time with this year’s budget, but they did take it quite seriously.
“They took an extra day to try to figure out what to do about it,” she said. “They looked at it prior to having the budget work session. It’s hard. We hear from you about what you need and what you expect, and it’s very difficult to try to figure out where to make those cuts.”
Carr said the county is getting help with some road repair, including a Cost Share grant for Meade Lake Road from the Kansas Department of Transportation.
“Any help we can get, we appreciate, but there’s not a lot of money out there for the counties to fix their roads,” he said.
Liberal Mayor Jose Lara suggested some help may be available in the near future from Apex Clean Energy, with whom the city recently signed an agreement for a water procurement option contract.
“Over the next year when they begin this project, they will also be coming in to upgrade your roads for the heavy trucks they would bring in with the windmills,” he said. “They will be paying for a lot of that upgrade. It would be good to have a meeting with them to see how soon that could happen and which roads you can take off your improvement plan. They will be the ones who bring in that money to do those upgrades.”
Resident Daniel Strickland said the county already has much revenue in place that needs to use.
“The services provided for the revenue we’re already paying in my opinion seems awful lacking,” he said. “We’re already paying for them, and we’re not getting them, but here you are wanting more money. The services we’re getting are sparse already in comparison to what we’re paying. It’s a matter of what we’re receiving to what we’re paying. We look harder at tightening our belt and cleaning some things up before we start going after the county taxpayers for more money.”
Following the hearing, Carr made a motion to approve the resolution stating the county’s intent to exceed the RNR, but when no second was heard, the motion died. Warden then explained that another hearing would need to take place before Sept. 20 to hear new concerns.
Commissioners met Wednesday afternoon with Warden in a special budget work session to look for further cuts in the budget. Warden said Wednesday evening, commissioners following the lengthy session decided to stick with the original published budget. A new public hearing is scheduled for 9 a.m. Sept. 19 in the commission chambers in the Seward County Administration Building.
