Round 2 coming for tax sale

The Linn County Treasurer’s Office will hold a second tax sale Aug. 10, because a third of the properties up for sale in June didn’t sell.

Usually everything goes in the first tax sale, Treasurer Mike Stevenson said. This year, about 500 properties went unsold, out of a total of roughly 1,800.

Adair Asset Management, a company that often buys hundreds of properties in tax sales across Iowa, pulled out this year — in Linn County and in other counties. “Their funding fell through,” Stevenson said.

Also, some buyers weren’t interested in flooded properties.

“There’s a lot of flood properties that didn’t get bought,” he said.

Tax sales in Iowa go back at least to 1851. Though the rules vary from county to county and have changed over the years, the annual events attract considerable attention from local and out-of-state investors.

In Linn County, buyers pay $100 for a bidding number. The number goes into a computer lottery, and whoever holds the number can buy a property every time the number is called.
After the winning bidders pay the back taxes on a property, they get a lien on it and collect interest on their investment until the actual owner pays back the tax and interest.

If the property owner doesn’t pay back the bidder in 21 months, the bidder gets the property.

More often, though, the bidder turns a profit by collecting interest on the lien, which is the legal claim the buyer holds on the property until his or her investment is repaid. Iowa law requires the owner to pay the lienholder 2 percent interest per month, or 24 percent annually.

Fargo flood protection tax passes in landslide

They don’t have a specific plan yet, but voters in Fargo approved a half-cent sales tax on Tuesday to pay for permanent flood protection.

Fresh on the city’s mind is the flood this spring, that required citizens and city workers to build miles of temporary levees out of sandbags and HESCO baskets.

Plans under consideration are a Red River diversion channel through Minnesota, and a $625 million levee system. Fargo’s population is about 90,000.

Escape from Comp Board Island

The job is thankless, unpaid, and requires members to subject themselves to a brutal political firestorm each year. The real news may be that anyone wants to do it.

Two members of the Linn County Compensation Board, which decides how much elected Linn County officials are paid, are giving up their posts. They are Mary Quass, a business owner who lives in Mount Vernon, and Allen Merta, vice president for economic development at Priority One.

The two — both of them were appointed by the supervisors — have asked not to be reappointed to the board, Brent Oleson said at Wednesday’s Board of Supervisors meeting. Their terms ended June 30.

Don Gray, the mayor of Central City who Oleson defeated in the District 4 supervisor race, has agreed to fill one of the empty spots, Oleson said. Amy Reasoner’s name came up as a possibility for the other opening.

Merta was chairman of the board. He and Quass both voted in February to freeze supervisor pay at $87,622, and both voted in 2008 to raise supervisor pay by 6 percent, a move that set off a controversy over supervisor pay that lasted more than a year.

At this year’s meeting, Quass attempted to strike a compromise between the Larry Wear/Dave O’Brien position (major pay cut) and the Ray Stefani/Phil Klinger position (no pay cut). Quass moved to cut supervisor salaries by 10 percent, to roughly $79,000 per year. That motion failed 4-2. Quass and Cedar Rapids attorney Steve Jackson Sr., who was appointed by County Attorney Harold Denton, were the only ones in favor. Quass eventually voted for the pay freeze.

The other two Comp Board members whose terms are up are Klinger, a treasurer appointment, and Wear, an auditor appointment. Klinger will be reappointed. Miller doesn’t know yet if Wear wants to stay on board.

Glass Rd. murder victim may have been out-of-towner

No arrests have been made in the shooting death of Dominique Mosby next to a patio outside an apartment along Glass Road on Friday night.

It’s not clear Mosby even lived in Cedar Rapids, and it’s not clear anyone even used the apartment where he was shot as a primary residence.

The 22-year-old victim’s family is in Chicago, police say, and the family hadn’t seen him in a couple of weeks. He died from gunshot wounds after a dice game.

Mosby had been in Eastern Iowa before. He had a Linn County warrant for his arrest, for failure to appear for possession of controlled substance and interference with official acts, related to an incident that occurred in September 2006. A few days later, in Johnson County, he was charged with consumption of alcohol. He was 20 at the time.

“The victim’s not a tenant,” said Jess Hebdon, property manager at Cedarwood Hills. “I’ve never heard his name before.”

Hebdon wouldn’t give the name of the man who lives at 2030 Glass Rd. NE, No. 105, the apartment outside of which Mosby was shot to death. He said, however, he thinks the tenant has left town.

Police aren’t sure who actually lived there.

“We’re still trying to figure out for sure who is on the lease,” Welsh said.

Tenants near the scene of the shooting said the patio outside Apartment 105 was often the site of dice games, but nobody admits to knowing the people who lived there.

“When there’s a group of six or seven people sitting there with stacks of money like this, playing dice…it’s not the kind of people you want to get mixed up with,” said a man who declined to give his name but lives in an apartment nearby.

He said police took into custody the “only person I’ve ever seen” in Apartment 105 on Friday night, though he didn’t know the man’s name.

As usual, I’m asking for your help as we try to cover this story. Would like to hear your questions, and your answers. Hopefully a search warrant will be filed today.

Here are some questions I’m considering going forward:

1. Who lived at the apartment?
2. Where is he/she now? Was he/she questioned?
3. How long had Mosby been in Cedar Rapids?
4. How often do police have this problem, an uncooperative pool of witnesses?
5. What are their strategies for overcoming that?
6. Was there an argument preceding the shooting? What about?

Details of Becker’s release from hospital remain clouded

The mental health coordinator who was supposedly told that the sheriff’s office should be notified when Mark Becker was released from a Waterloo hospital is Bob Lincoln.

The Butler County Sheriff’s Office says it was not notified, and the hospital, Covenant Medical Center, says it was not asked to notify the sheriff’s office.

Becker shot Aplington-Parkersburg Head Football Coach Ed Thomas to death the next morning, prompting questions about why the 24-year-old wasn’t given more oversight when he was let out of the hospital.

Lincoln does not work for the hospital. He’s an employee of Butler County Community Services and serves as central point coordinator for mental health services. He said Friday he could not comment, and wasn’t aware that the sheriff’s office and hospital have been issuing dueling statements on whether the sheriff should have been notified upon Becker’s release.

A judicial magistrate issued an emergency detention order for Becker on Sunday, asking that he be evaluated. Iowa law required that the hospital release Becker within 48 hours of the order, unless someone had filed an application with the clerk of court stating that Becker was “seriously mentally impaired.” That application would have required a doctor’s written statement to that effect, and supporting affidavits.

The hospital said it released Becker to a “third party” on Tuesdsay, but it’s not clear who that was. It’s also not clear whether he was evaluated after while in the hospital, and what that evaluation revealed.

Lincoln and the hospital are citing HIPAA, the medical privacy laws, as an obstacle to their speaking openly about the case.

Would-be midnight intruder gets seven days

Daniel Kvidahl, the man who has been scaring the dickens out of his neighbor over the past six months by trying to get into her home in the middle of the night, will serve six days and six hours in jail after pleading guilty to criminal trespass and public intoxication for a March 31 incident.

Kvidahl was sentenced this morning at a brief court proceeding in the basement of the Palmer Building, 123 Fifth St. SE.

Sara Marino, a divorced mother of two who lives next door to Kvidahl, testified before the sentencing, with Kvidahl sitting a few feet away. The criminal justice system has not been able to keep him from repeatedly acting in a way that seems threatening, she said.

“I would like to have him just stay away,” she said. “He scares me. He scares my kids.”

Kvidahl scoffed at this, and his lawyer touched his arm to restrain him.

Linn County Attorney Nick Scott sought the seven-day jail sentence and a substance abuse evaluation.

“There’s an opportunity for the court to make an impression on the defendant as to the seriousness of the offense,” Scott said. “This is inappropriate behavior, and it should not continue.”

Kvidahl admitted having a problem with alcohol, and said he’s taking medication and attending Alcoholics Anonymous meetings.

He said he thought Marino’s house was his own, and tried to enter by mistake, because he was drunk. (It’s worth mentioning here that Marino and Kvidahl have quite different front doors. She has a covered porch, with a few wooden steps up to it. He has no porch, but only a cement pad almost at ground level.)

“I really, really, truly never meant to do no harm,” Kvidahl said. “Anything I have done, I’m truly, truly sorry.”

But he and his attorney argue he shouldn’t be sentenced to jail time. He never has before, in three separate instances where he was arrested on Marino’s property. He said The Gazette’s report about what has transpired between him and Marino, and the embarrassment it caused, has been punishment enough.

“The embarrassment and all the things that I’ve been through is like a punishment in itself,” he said.

The judge, Magistrate Lorraine Machacek, gave Kvidahl the jail sentence prosecutors asked for, citing “some indication” that Kvidahl’s behavior has been repeated and his “extensive criminal history.”

“I quite frankly can’t imagine anything more frightening than to have someone enter my house uninvited when they’re under the influence of alcohol,” she said.

Kvidahl will serve his jail sentence in chunks on weekends.

Supes to ask city about federal courthouse

The Linn County Board of Supervisors said they will send a letter to the city on Friday asking if the federal courthouse on First Avenue East will be available as a “potential location” for the juvenile courts system.

Juvenile courts were permanently driven out of the basement of the Linn County Courthouse by last year’s flood, and the supervisors are looking around for a place to put them.

The federal courthouse, which was also damaged in the flood, will come under the city’s control as part of a land swap to give land for a new federal courthouse to the federal government.

The federal courthouse does not appear to be the county’s first choice for juvenile courts, but the supervisors are sending the letter regardless, despite having bowed out of a joint long-term planning process with the city.

“I don’t want the federal courthouse,” Supervisor Brent Oleson said. “It’s 80,000 square feet and it’s on the river. It’s too big.”

Supervisors toured the courthouse earlier in the spring, and were disappointed to find that the federal government left the mechanicals of the building in the basement when it did repairs.

Supervisor Jim Houser, though, pointed out that the building is attractive to the court system because it’s close to the county courthouse, already has courtrooms in it and offers room for expansion, which the courts need.

The supervisors will send the letter in an effort, at very least, to “dispose of options” that might be brought up in the public sphere over the next few months.

Their first choice right now is to build a new juvenile courts building on the site of the Freeway Lounge on Eighth Avenue SW. The county owns the space, and will get an engineering firm to do a feasibility study to see if a juvenile courts building will fit there. Results should be back by next week.

13 commute using county vehicles

Thirteen non-sheriff’s office county officials use county vehicles to commute to and from work – five from conservation, five from the engineer’s office, two from the emergency management agency and one from public health.

Iowa law allows this, as long as the government employee reports that he or she uses a public vehicle for their commute, and that $3 per day is added to their taxable income. If the worker stops at a county work site on the way to work, she doesn’t have to report the commute.

At the request of The Gazette, Auditor Joel Miller obtained a list of county employees who commute to work using a county vehicle.

“There’s no policy,” Miller said. “If you don’t give them some guidelines, then everyone’s open to abuse this thing.”

Read more about this in tomorrow’s Gazette.

Looking for a steal in delinquent properties

I spent yesterday morning at the annual Linn County tax sale, and wrote about it for today’s paper.

It was a little monotonous to listen to Treasurer Mike Stevenson, in a bored voice, call out the properties and the bidding numbers for about two hours. But it’s a serious business, and some 75 people showed up for it. They bidded on properties for the interest they can get from the late taxpayer, which is 24 percent annually in Iowa.

Where are Section 8 housing vouchers used in C.R.?

There’s a huge cluster in Wellington Heights. Here’s the map:

Section 8 Housing Map