No good deed goes unpunished

Opinion

Discussion

October 31, 2009

by Alvin and Joan Miller Pharos-Tribune Sat Oct 31, 2009, 11:21 PM EDT

This spring, the Pharos-Tribune and the rest of the news media were giving out the message that if the Cass County citizens did not come into the courthouse and pay some of their property taxes for this year that the county would have to borrow a lot of money to make this county continue to function in the financial area. This would cost the county additional expenses by having to pay interest on the loan.

The late billing has been happening now for the last few years due to the state not getting the county tax rates figured out in time for the proper assessment billings to be mailed in a timely fashion so the taxpayer can pay their first installment by May 10 when it is usually due. We considered the situation and decided to go to the courthouse on May 5 and make an advance payment of $1,000. At that point, we had no idea what our bill would be but that was more than half of our previous year’s taxes. We thought this would help all concerned. They gladly accepted our check.

When we finally got our billing and assessment papers, we saw that our entire bill was for $1,484.38. One parcel was for $1,349.86 and the other was for $134.52. By the way, if you think I am giving away our personal information to the public, let me tell you that this information is already public and anyone can obtain this information by making a phone call or stopping into the courthouse to find out.

Anyway, we did some math and figured that we had paid 67.3682 percent of our bill, and we would be fine until the fall payment of $484.38 would be due on Nov. 10.

We went into the Cass County Courthouse on Wednesday, Oct. 14 to pay the balance on our property taxes. When we went to write out the check, we learned that we owed a total of $496.11. The figure included a penalty of $6.73. Why a penalty? We were shocked to say the least. The explanation we were given was that we did not designate which billing we wanted the previous $1,000 to be applied on.

Did we know what my bill was when I paid the original $1,000? No! How in the world were we supposed to know what parcel we were to apply the money? No one asked if we had more than one parcel.

The treasurer’s office gal replied that if we did not designate which parcel the money was to go to that it all went on the $1,349.86 bill (which we did not see at the time of the first payment because it wasn’t available) nor was the second parcel calculated.

So much for being a good citizen and trying to do your civic duty. We have never ever been late paying our property taxes in the past. We realize the interest rates for leaving our $1,000 in our bank account would probably not add up to the $6.73 that it cost us for the late penalty, but it is the principle of the whole thing.

We are writing this so hopefully it won’t happen to anyone else. Trust us. It won’t happen to us again. We just won’t pay anything until we have to.

• Alvin and Joan Miller are residents of Twelve Mile.

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No good deed goes unpunished

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