Missteps by county clerk's office sends publisher scrambling to publish notice

By Charlene Sims, info@linncountyjournal.com

MOUND CITY – Last week, the Linn County News printed a special section a day after the original printing  because the Linn County budget that was required to be printed last week was not in the paper.

So on Wednesday night, June 13, Linn County News Publisher Jackie Taylor, had a special section printed with the Notice of Revenue Neutral Rate Intent and she took it to all of the box locations and added it to the newspaper so that the notice was in there on Thursday. 

Taylor spoke with Linn County Commission members Alison Hamilton and Jim Johnson on Monday, Aug. 18, about the mixup with the publication of the revenue neutral rate notice. She started out by handing out emails that were exchanged between the Linn County News office and Linn County Clerk Danielle Souza for the past two weeks. (Taylor provided copies of the emails to the Journal for this story.)

While Taylor addressed the commission, however, Souza had been directed by Hamilton to follow Chasity Ware into her office while she collected her things. Ware, who was economic development director, had resigned her post in a blistering statement just before Taylor’s discussion with the commissioners. (See related story.) 

Souza returned to the meeting toward the end of Taylor’s discussion, but wasn’t present for most of it.

Taylor told the commissioners that she thought there needed to be a clarification of why her paper printed the 4 page 33.5 volume on  Wednesday that went into the paper.

Taylor said, “First off, we do not pick and choose what legals, what public notices go into the paper. All public notices go into the paper. What happened here. What you’ve got in front of you is a chronology of emails from our county clerk through the point. There is about an eight- or nine-day period in there. 

“There was a failure to communicate in some of this stuff. So Danielle and I have visited. We have talked, but what happened in this thing is that we have probably 30- some budgets that come in over this time period including Linn County.”

She showed them budgets from other entities and Linn County last year to show what needed to be published.

“I pulled 2024. I’m just going to show you what we have here,” Taylor told the commissioners. “They all have budget notices that look like this. Including Linn County last year, that was this one.”

Taylor used the examples to show that the form that was submitted by Souza for publication of the public meeting for exceeding the revenue neutral rate was not the same as in the past or even what other government entities submitted this year.

Taylor continued, “We have had a lot of people coming in, and I have, believe me, a lot of grace for a new person. I understand she’s being fed stuff by firehose. I get it, but I’m hearing accusations that we chose not to print the Linn County budget. That is not the case. So, if you look at this budget hearing, like I said, we started getting things Aug. 4 including the Linn County Revenue neutral form.

“So, what we received from you, if you want to look on page 54, you’ll see that we received this Notice of Revenue Neutral Rate Intent and it states governing body of Linn County herby notifies the PRATT County Clerk of intent to exceed the revenue neutral rate. 

“We really try to do things right, guys. We proof, we reproof and you can see by that there’s a form in here that’s got a checklist of all of the entities that we get budgets from. The county clerk is calling us, ‘Which ones do you have, which ones don’t you have?’ Communicating back and forth. We emailed several times, ‘What about Linn County?’ 

“And it was never responded to in an eight- or nine-day period. And I don’t know if she thought that she sent it and we didn’t have it, but this is what we received and it’s not what we were used to running. And like I said, we don’t pick and choose what we put in.

“So come Wednesday, August 13, I get a call from the county clerk. ‘Hey, where’s our budget? How come we don’t have our revenue neutral notice in?’ So, we’re looking through the paper and you can see in the paper that we did not print it.

“So, I call my attorney, it’s like what are we going to do? We have two choices. First, we can put that budget notice in a paper that has widespread circulation in the county, meaning the Kansas City Star. Our circulation beats the Kansas City Star. 

“Second option was we create an edition number whatever next in line and we print a special edition and insert it and get that thing in the mail so that it can be out by Aug. 15 so that the county can hold your public notice, I mean your public hearing Aug. 25. That’s what we chose to do.

“So, we created that little four-page insert. The girls created that thing, sent it up to printer. Thank goodness they had time to do it. The public notice of the intent to exceed whatever. But prior to that when we were looking at it, we also, Danielle sent us the corrected copy of this thing that says Linn County rather than Pratt County.

“So, the corrected copies that said that they report back to Linn County went into this little insert. I was up at Weston, Mo., picking up this special addition Wednesday afternoon at three o’clock and I get an email from Danielle, ‘Hey, if you can get it, here’s the budget notice also if it is in time.’ 

“We’ve already gone to press, so maybe we need to discuss deadlines on top of this thing.

“And so, this thing cost me probably $750 by the time we’re done with printing it, inserting it, mailing it, my time running around. I had to go through every box in this county and inserting these things into the real paper because the problem would have been somebody gets this four-page and I had it come in my office. They’re like ‘What the heck is this thing? Why are we doing this?’ So I inserted it into the actual newspaper itself so that everybody is legal and good to go.

“So, my gist here is I do not want anybody thinking that we do not take this stuff seriously because we do. It is our job as official paper to make sure the public has this stuff and that it is done correctly. We have a checklist that we go through. We don’t just blow steam for the heck of it.

“We send emails so that people can follow the evidence stream and help us out. Hey, we need this. Okay, great. Whatever. So  that is the gist of this meeting today. And I’m sure Danielle next year and like I said (to Danielle) you were fed information by fire hose and I get it. 

“But I don’t know where this came from, that we did this on purpose. It was not done on purpose. I guarantee you. We do not do that. I’ve had two incidents in 31 years like this. One in 1994 where we had to send public notice to another paper to get it inserted because our paper just couldn’t do it. And this one, we do not do that kind of thing.”

Taylor asked if the commissioners had any questions.

“I never heard that so,” said Commissioner Hamilton. “I never, I really didn’t. I knew that there was an issue. Danielle reached out to all of us and I think we immediately (did) whatever to make it right. I didn’t blame anyone necessarily. I think we were just trying to figure out how to make it right.”     

“You bet. And that’s what we did,” ” said Taylor. “We ended up communicating and we’ve got some systems in place that we need to educate you further on. And it worked. You guys are legal for what you are doing now,

Hamilton asked Taylor if she had any issues with the $750 and if she wanted to talk about that.

Taylor said she put it as her cost of doing business as the county’s official newspaper.

“Obviously, if you want to help me that would be awesome,” said Taylor. “But that is not why I came in here. Because I want it done right and it’s right now and you know people were going, ‘What the heck?’”

“I know it was confusing but I don’t think any of us were blaming. I know I wasn’t,” said Hamilton. “I didn’t really understand the process either, so trying to make it right. We were going through all the different, you know, if we sent out another mailer, lots of different things. How much that was going to cost us? 

“It was going to cost us $17,000 if we had to do that again. Just lots of things we were talking about and it was never, for me it was never blaming anyone. We were just trying to figure out what should we do? What’s the best situation for everyone? How much is this going to cost? 

“You know I even asked, you know, how much is this going to cost Jackie if she has to reprint it? There were a lot of questions I was asking. I never communicated directly with you just because we were kind of talking about that, but we were just throwing out all the different concerns.”

“By the grace of God,” said Taylor, “we figured we got this thing in buy a squeak of my press was able to do it. We were able to get things to the post office and get it done and it was just that it all worked really well. I’ve got a great crew and it just all came together. We want to try to avoid this next year.”

“Absolutely, I appreciate everything you guys did. I didn’t have any complaints about it honestly,” said Hamilton. “I just was trying to get it figured out having Danielle work on that.