ROBERT PIERCE
• Leader & Times
With Seward County in an ongoing battle over a proposed 14-mill hike in the levy for Fiscal Year 2026, some have said constituents are being misled and do not have all the information available to see the full picture of how the increase came to be.
Treasurer Mary Rose said she is seeing similar information being given out about her office.
“It seems there’s some not truthful information going out in the community,” she said at the Dec. 15 county commissioners meeting.
First, Rose said she and her staff never stopped working on tax statements and the tax roll for both 2025 and 2026.
“I did send that email out Oct. 31,” she said. “The clerk’s office did give us those tax rolls from that moment on. We did start printing on the tax rolls. We printed, we bound them, and we put them in the basement Nov. 3 and Nov. 4. From there, we started printing state assess 1620 and personal property.”
Rose said these went out Nov. 5, and treasurer’s office staff then began working on gas and oil statements.
“We had 12,000 statements on gas and 2,700 on oil from that,” she said. “We started doing that Nov. 17 and 18. We did get those printed, and we finally got those mailed out.”
Next, Rose’s staff worked on real estate statements, and with those, a software program issue arose when workers went to print the statements.
“We were waiting on a workaround from CIC,” she said. “We did do a workaround and started printing those off Nov. 19 through 21.”
Rose said staff worked on statements Saturday, Nov. 22, to get them out by Sunday, Nov. 23. Work was also planned for that day, but due to a severe storm that included lightning and rain, that was not possible.
“We did put those in the mail on the 23rd, 24th right before Thanksgiving because we had to finish up on that Monday, which was the 24th,” she said. “We mailed them on the 25th. We took the real estate to Meade. We had a 24-hour turnaround. The other ones did go through the postal service in Liberal.”
Rose said she wanted the public to know none of these statements were thrown away, and all of them were printed.
“We printed and stuffed every single one of those,” she said. “We also mailed those out. We did that to make sure people would come in our office to fill out voter forms. All of it went out per statute. It had to be postmarked by Dec. 15.”
Commissioner Tammy Sutherland-Abbott asked why was information excluded about paying online from the statements.
“Nowhere on there does it say that,” she said.
Initially, Rose said she was unsure why the information was not on the form.
“Some of that has to do with the fact there’s not enough room to put everything on there,” she said. “Some treasurers have gone to putting sticky stuff on the envelopes. It’s not on there, and it’s not just our county that uses that software program.”
Rose said the treasurer’s office began accepting payments Dec. 1.
“All of the postage that was done through the post office has to be verified, and therefore, they scanned that,” she said. “When the real estate statements went out and I took the 20,000 pieces of mail to the post office, they have to verify that, and they have to e-mail or give us a scan bar back saying we verified this is how many pieces of mail we got.”
Rose said real estate tax statements provided most, if not all, of the issues for this year, and she said a workaround was available.
“Normally, we always get them out before Thanksgiving, so we didn’t do anything that was out of the ordinary to do that,” she said.
Commissioner Todd Stanton asked what the issue was. Rose said statements were being double printed.
“Normally, what would happen is you would download it to PDF, and you would save it and start printing from there,” Rose said. “Due to the printers, we could only do 2,000 at a time and then let the printers cool down. The workaround was don’t PDF it. You have to go in, pull up the software and let it completely load, and then you have to go from what page you want to print. The PDF was not able to be used on the real estate statements, and that was the way they said it would stop from printing the double lines of the mill levy that was in the middle of the real estate.”
Commissioner Presephoni Fuller asked what the purpose of using blue sheets and a memo to allow people to pay taxes in protests under the ongoing Arkalon Ethanol case, which is still in litigation.
“I don’t understand what gives the authority to do that,” Fuller said.
Rose said when the tax year started, discussion took place within the community about payments under protest.
“This is our payment under protest application,” she said. “Normally, we do these on white paper. This year, because we found out the constituents of Seward County were going to be doing an illegal mill levy, which I had never heard of before, I decided we needed to get our I’s dotted and our T’s crossed.”
“You just said ‘I decided,’” Fuller said. “Who’s over you?”
“I decided to call the Board of Tax Appeals,” Rose said. “We decided we were going to use two different forms. This is where I was going with that. We decided to use the yellow one, which goes to the county appraiser, and the blue one was going to go to the county treasurer. We wanted to see what kind of paper we had in stock so we didn’t have to charge anymore money to the taxpayer.”
Rose said she asked Appraiser Angela Eichman if using blue sheets would be acceptable for statements for what was termed the “illegal mill levy” and yellow sheets for valuation. Eichman said this was perfect.
“Then I called the Board of Tax Appeals, and I said I need to know all of the ins and outs and what I need to do because the county treasurer is in charge of this part,” she said.
Sutherland-Abbott asked who decided Rose could make that claim. Rose said the form is from the state, but Sutherland-Abbott said the Arkalon case had yet to be decided by the Board of Tax Appeals. Rose said she was simply abiding by what constituents had asked her to do.
“They asked for the illegal levy,” she said. “My office is for resources. I printed this off, put it on the Web page. I called BOTA and talked to them. When I was talking to them, we went through the whole sheet, line for line, how to fill it out, what I needed to do, and they told me the form had to be notarized. I said ‘Is it a conflict of interest that my office notarizes or anybody of the county notarizes it?’ They said absolutely not. I asked ‘Is it a conflict of interest if my office helps fill this out?’ They said absolutely not because you also do the payment under protest.”
After getting through this process, Rose asked BOTA officials if a label would be acceptable, and she got a definitive yes back.
“I asked ‘May I send it to you, and you look over it and tell me if that’s acceptable?’” she said. “I am in contact with BOTA every single day this week. Five days out of the week, I am in contact with correspondence or a phone call with them. There is nowhere on this label that it has the opinion of the treasurer, nor the opinion or recommendation of the county treasurer or the county. My office is simply giving them resources.”
Rose said one comment came in asking if taxpayers pay for this.
“I can’t believe that was even a comment or a question,” she said. “The taxpayer pays for all of this, all of the resources. Everything that is done here is done with all of this, whether it be valuation or an illegal levy, and it’s a service we provide.”
Fuller asked Rose if BOTA was aware the county is in litigation at this time.
“You’re saying to me they approved you putting labels on things,” Fuller said.
“I’m not putting them on,” Rose said. “The citizen is at their discretion to put this or put that in their own words. If they choose to do that, that’s up to them. This is not saying you need to put it on there. It’s there if you would like to use it or if you like to use the verbiage. I don’t know what’s all going out there, but here’s what I have.”
“But you’re not discouraging it,” Sutherland-Abbott said. “It’s almost as if you’re insinuating.”
“How do you know I’m not discouraging it?” Rose said.
County Clerk Stacia Long and Administrator April Warden said constituents were not completing forms in their entirety.
“They’re just signing their name and turning it into her,” Warden said.
Rose said the treasurer’s office has copies of the forms that are taken and what needs to be given to constituents before paperwork is given to Eichman’s office.
“These are being filled out,” she said. “They’re being filled out in my office per statute, and they are being sent to the appropriate person. I have not had any complaints, nor have I had anything that said what we were doing was wrong. It would be no different than me giving them a pen to fill out the form or the paper to do it.”
“It was brought to us by some constituents who were concerned about the form,” Warden said.
“Are you going to tell us who those people are?” Stanton asked Warden.
“No because you guys aren’t willing to tell yours either,” Warden said.
Commission Chair Scott Carr cut the conversation at this point, and the meeting moved to the next item on the agenda.
