Somebody is stupid here. It’s a combination of Kansas legislators and the Attorney General.
Under state law, the AG determines if a bond issue meets legal requirements. Also under a new state law, county election officials must publish notification of any election in a county website, as well as a newspaper.
In an election last May, the voters of the Greeley County school district, one of the smallest in the state, approved a 4 million dollar bond issue for renovating some facilities. Notification of the election was not posted on the county’s website, because the small county doesn’t have a website. However, it was published on the school website, and the school superintendent made efforts to inform the community regarding the merits of the bond issue.
However, the AG has determined that the bond issue didn’t follow the law and has blocked the funding.
“I feel like we have ignored a core tenet of our society and our government as a whole,” said John Niehues, the district superintendent. “You know, it’s the will of the people.”
Well, the claim wasn’t that the county was “too small” to have a website. It’s that the county is small so it doesn’t have one. Sure, anybody could register a site and throw up a blank page, but there’s no purpose to that.
If the population really is only 1200 across the entire county, it is probably not a priority to set up a proper county website.
And if they did decide to make one, they’d have to do it right, i.e. compliance with all relevant Kansas statutes and maintenance, which means having a semi-dedicated person (meaning $ out of the no doubt limited funds in such a low population county) to set it up and keep it going. A slapdash homebrew page would be rightly excoriated. That would be worse than no page at all.
If it is the AG’s position that compliance requires the county have a website in order to fulfill various requirements, that’s an unfunded mandate. Let the state provide money to set up and maintain a site, if that’s the case.
I’ll say this about the county, if they are truly too small to setup an official website, they should be part of a larger organization that can. I don’t like the idea that they don’t need to do 21st century outreach for a bond issue because they’re so small that “everyone” knows what they need to know.
The notice was on the school website. The notice was also on the website of the local newspaper, as required by law. Greeley County Republican
These notices, until a year before this election, were sufficient 21st century outreach for the bond issue. It was only after the Kansas legislature passed the 2023 law that suddenly these notices were not sufficient enough.
If the population is only 1200, then the county is probably so rural that only a percentage actually have internet (maybe less than 50%?) If the state is going to mandate a website, it should also provide internet to the citizens. I suspect that the newspaper reaches more of them than the internet anyway.
Availability of truly high speed internet (let’s say >100Mbps just to put a number on it) might be limited, but I would guess a solid majority have some form of internet availability at home.
Plus whatever they can get via phone plans, which I would think approaches 100% availability, even if not everybody in that county goes that route.
The article said $4.6m bond. So, if the population is really only 1200, that’s almost $4,000 each. That’s a hellova tax increase!
Edited to add…
From the original article,…
OK, so their taxes don’t go up. The current bonds are expiring and the school wants to issue new ones. And, they’re not paying all up front, they’re paying over the lifetime of the bonds. I think this puts it at (roughly) $500 / year. Again, for every adult and child, so (roughly) $1,200 per family per year. That’s on top of whatever covers school operating funds. That seems like a lot of tax burden.
Correct. So instead of taxes being reduced by $130 per year per $100k of the value of a house, those taxes will remain in place. But taxes will not be increased if the bond measure is approved by the AG.
Potentially sufficient for a tiny county, not at all sufficient for a county with hundreds of thousands of residents, but the law has to be the same for everyone, or it’s not really a law. The Kansas legislature failed to put in a single purpose exception for outreach to accommodate a tiny county that can’t be bothered to make a website.