Stealth tax hike election for Northeast Technology Center

Did you know there was a property tax election northeast of Tulsa on Tuesday? Neither did the voters involved, the county officials, or the area's leading property taxpayer, according to a story in the Oologah Lake Leader.

Northeast Technology Center, an Oklahoma vo-tech school district with campuses in Pryor, Afton, Kansas (the town, not the state), and Claremore, is holding a special property tax election on December 11, and according to the Oologah Lake Leader, they've been trying to keep it below the public radar. A legal notice was filed, but only in the smaller of the two papers that serve the city of Pryor, and nowhere else in the far-flung district, which covers most of Ottawa, Craig, Delaware, Mayes, and Rogers Counties, plus parts of Wagoner, Nowata, and Cherokee Counties.

One of the two ballot items would increase the building levy from 1 mill to 5 mills and the other item would make the new levy permanent. The district's overall levy, which includes 10 mills for operations, would increase from 11 to 15 mills. The increase would raise $4.4 million per year.

Via Tyson Wynn, who has more to say on the matter.

UPDATE: Tyson Wynn reports this morning that his IP was blocked by the Northeast Technology Center website:

Get this. I visited the NTC website via your link last night. I went back to look at the press release this morning and it says I don't have permission.

Tyson had no trouble accessing the site via another IP address. He said he'd then called NTC and was told they had no way to block an IP address, which is baloney. They're running Apache 1.3.34, and it's a simple matter of adding a line to the webserver configuration file. Amazingly, he was able to access the site again shortly after he spoke to them.

Why don't they want anyone to know about this election?

MORE: MeeCiteeWurkor has some thoughts on the NTC's stealth tax:

If you live in one of the counties listed above, be sure and hit the polls on Dec. 11th and shut down these people trying to take your money. Before you go, email this guy: garyfox@netechcenters.com Let him know exactly how you feel about his press release. He's the NTC marketing and communications director. I'm sure as a communications director, he'd love to communicate with you about this. Perhaps he could also explain his involvement with this sneaky little scheme.