Wind companies choke truth with gag orders

The wind may blow free, but the use of gag orders in lease agreements and easements that force property owners to keep their mouths shut about the realities they endure as sites for those giant wind turbines makes information flow anything but.

That's critical in this fat cat, tax-credit fueled industry which, more and more, depends on secrecy as much as it does a steady breeze. Wind farm developers like to point to thousands of lease holders at projects across the country and how few complaints they have about their gigantic neighbors, but they never mention the source of all that satisfaction – prosecution and financial ruination due to gag clauses in those signed leases and easement agreements. Indeed, where you can keep control of the smoke, there's no evidence of a fire.

Keeping tight control of information and particularly criticism from eye-witnesses is allowing wind companies like those moving against targets in Linn and Neosho counties and other rural communities in Kansas to go about their business without interference from public regulatory authorities and other outsiders who want to chronicle precisely how much damage is being done by wind turbines. Silenced victims suffer for their property, their environment and their own health. But the gag orders that bind those lease holders are clear: Speak up, particularly to the media, and not only will your lease payments disappear but we'll sue you – and we'll still have a 55-story tall tower on your land which you can't stop us from operating.

Perhaps the most damning casualty of this secrecy is in the kibosh it has put to extended research on Wind Turbine Syndrome, a health condition identified among many people living near wind turbines and believed to be caused by light flicker from the moving blades, fluctuations in air pressure as those blades move past their base tower and low-frequency noise they produce. In her book “Wind Turbine Syndrome: A report on a natural experiment,” Dr. Nina Pierpont conducted extensive clinical interviews with 10 families living near wind farm turbines both in the U.S. and abroad. The Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine-trained pediatrician discovered a striking uniformity of complaints from these families – migraine, motion sickness, vertigo, noise and visual and gastrointestinal sensitivity, and anxiety. Between the time of her interviews and the final publication of the book, nine of the ten families had fled their homes for residences away from wind farms, and a 10^th who couldn't afford to move did extensive renovations to their house in an attempt to defeat the pressure and frequency issues, and had reduced air flow inside the home to the point it was now hard to heat.

A full-on epidemiological study however will probably never be done – one that correlates the common symptoms Pierpont identified and possible causes like setback from a turbine and what aspects of exposure to measure – because the bulk of the study subjects are all gagged.

“Better Plan Wisconsin” is a wind farm opposition organization in the Badger State which got hold of a wind farm lease from a farmer who'd had enough. The story is nearly identical state to state and lease to lease. Landowners who sign leases or easements can't discuss noise, vibration, shadow flicker or any disruptions the turbines might cause to their properties. The gag orders stop all discussion regarding the terms of the lease, or the construction or operation of the turbines, as well as speaking to reporters or to anyone in the media or issuing statements or press releases without the written permission of the wind company. Then there's this jewel:

“This section shall survive the termination of expiration of this lease,” meaning the gag order survives forever, even after the lease is terminated. Under the threat of litigation, you are gagged for life.

Still, impoverished county leaders and farmers embrace the promise of lease payments and payments in lieu of taxes (Kansas wind farms are exempt from property taxes, unlike other power plants), ignoring the deafening silence coming from those signed to the lease agreements.

Yes, silence is golden. That's just how the wind companies want it. ###

– Dane Hicks is publisher of The Anderson County Review in Garnett, Kan.

My 4 year-old, the Mexican drug mule

My youngest daughter was four years old when her Social Security number was found in the possession of an illegal alien living in Lincoln, Neb., who’d been arrested in connection with a methamphetamine bust. 

So I have a unique perspective on criminal immigration and the major underground industry which buying and selling stolen SSI numbers has become in the illegal immigrant community. The crime reaches to every corner of the U.S., even 3,000 population Garnett, Kansas.

It is an unfortunate component of countless crimes involving illegal immigrants, including the death of Iowa college student Mollee Tibbetts, whose body was discovered last fall in an Iowa cornfield a month after she went missing while jogging. A 24 year-old illegal who worked on a nearby dairy farm led investigators to the body and has since been charged with her stabbing and murder. His trial is set for April.

Indeed it’s the trade in stolen SSI numbers that helps facilitate the illegal immigration challenge that faces the U.S. Just as big a problem is that the Social Security Administration has virtually nothing to gain in helping solve the crime. 

A SSI number is the magic key for people not legally authorized to be in the country. With it comes employment authenticity and a bona fide identity; it’s a guarantee that payroll taxes can be paid and unemployment contributions withheld, and that your employment identity will fade into the woodwork like so many millions of tax paying workers. It is anonymity that illegal immigrants pay dearly to have. 

In Mollie Tibbetts’ case, Christhian Rivera apparently falsified his credentials used by the E-Verify system, the internet-based process that runs an individual’s identity through Homeland Security and the Social Security Administration to determine one’s status both nationally and internationally. Rivera’s employer says Rivera passed the E-Verify check. While the full details are not yet known, it is highly likely Rivera had a stolen SSI number. 

The sobering phone call I got at my office that day 11 years ago from a DEA agent based in Omaha was as enlightening as it was terrifying. His first question: Did we have any domestic help working in our house? It’s common, he explained, for house cleaning staff working in people’s homes to gain access to children’s SSI numbers and sell them to brokers who then resell them to illegals in package deals that set them up in this country. Hospital staff in children’s wings or doctor’s offices work their opportunities too, he told me, because they have access to those numbers from the minute they’re assigned at birth through any time the child seeks medical treatment thereafter. 

They like kids’ numbers, he told me, because they’re less likely to be used much and they’re pretty much inactive until the first time the kid pays taxes from a summer job or has to file a tax return. In our case we believed our daughter’s number had been compromised for at least two years – and at no time did it ever seem strange to anyone who worked at Social Security that a four year-old would be paying employment taxes from a construction job in Nebraska?

But then again, why should Social Security care who pays into the fund? The more the merrier, as far as SSI is concerned, considering its pyramid scheme mechanics have it set for eventual insolvency anyway.

I also have reason to wonder how extensive is the background check within the E-Verify system if a four year-old paying employment taxes from a construction or farm labor job doesn’t raise a red flag with someone.

Now our family's worries are double.

Not only do we have to be concerned that multiple as yet unknown others may have been sold our daughter’s SSI number, but we have to wonder, when one day included as a part of her college applications, car loans, mortgage documents or military enlistment papers, will her SSI number be flagged by some leftover error from a drug bust in Lincoln, or who knows what else? 

Common sense dictates, as border patrol agents and those who live close to the border recount constantly, that we need a wall or "physical barrier" or whatever you want to call it to help stem the tide of illegals surging into our country. But we need a credible screening system within the Social Security Administration to ferret out stolen numbers and bogus employees to countermand the damage done by criminal illegals who are already here.

-Dane Hicks is president of Garnett Publishing, Inc., and publisher of The Anderson County Review in Garnett, Kan.

Let's make vacations great again

EDITORIAL – Are you a rock-bellied Red Stater tired of spending your entertainment dollars in liberal bastions that elect socialist-leaning ne’er-do-wells? Are you anxious for a list of places where your hard-earned R&R dollars can go to benefit businesses and voters more akin to your political persuasion? 

Many of us have come to realize we’d prefer to support #MAGA believers by making our long-awaited time off this year a Red State Vacation. 

Heck, in a lot of cases it’s a simple safety issue. We were barely 12 minutes into the New Year last week when Chicago, where Democrats have voted early and often for three generations, logged its first incident of gun violence of 2019. A 12 year-old boy was looking out a second story residential window when a bullet whizzed through the glass and hit him in the hand. 

Four more shootings would follow on New Year’s Day, miraculously all non-fatal. 

The thugs had pretty much taken a holiday to ring in the New Year in the Windy City. The prior day – New Year’s Eve – only nine people were shot and two murdered within the Chicago metro area. But all in all, 2018 was a banner year for homicides in the city – 561 for the year (1.53 killings a day) compared to 660 in 2017 and 770 in 2016. 

So forget those fabulous weekend flight deals to Chicago, or the smog-ridden Hollywierd beckoning of the People’s Republic of California, or the Cheech & Chong intellectualism of Denver or the Colorado Mountains. Say goodbye to the overpriced calamari and tomato basil appetizers at those vanilla latte Johnson County hives where RINOs plot Democrat governorships and socialist takeovers of the 3rd Congressional District. Why not spend your recreation dollars in places where people vote like you do? 

Consider for instance Bedford County, Tenn., which went 75 percent Trump, 22 percent Clinton in 2016. There’s the Champion Run Golf Course in Shelbyville and the Tennessee Walking Horse Museum, and the jam-packed annual Moon Pie Festival featuring a slice of the world’s largest Moon Pie! 

Las Animas, Colo., flipped from Democrat to Republican in 2016, 55 percent Trump to 39 percent Clinton. There’s not much Red in Colorado, but in this little pocket you’ll find tons of Santa Fe Trail history with Bent’s Old Fort and Boggsville, both historic trail points. Plus, you’ll find the best guacamole and salsa in Southern Colorado at Carmen’s Restaurant. 

Don’t forget Hooker County, Neb., whose population of 736 souls don’t see many visitors, but which mustered 86 percent of their vote for Trump and 10 for Clinton. The Sandhills are cool, and you can float the Middle Loup River. Mullen has a new disc golf course, and the Hondo Lanes bowling alley is newly renovated. 

Calhoun County, MI., also flipped Blue to Red in 2016, with 54 percent voting Trump to 41 for Clinton. Battle Creek boasts the Binder Zoo with some 400 acres and more than 600 specimens on exhibit. Don’t forget the Fort Custer State Recreation area, a former WWII training ground now a 3,300 acre nature park with hiking and horse trails, river beach areas and more. 

And let’s not forget Scott County, Ks., whose stalwart Republican corps voted 85 percent Trump to 11 percent what’s-her-name. In Scott City, culture, natural wonder and science abound with the El Quartelejo Museum, Jerry Thomas and Keystone galleries, Monument Rocks and Spender Flight and Education Center – and the really cool Majestic Theater Restaurant. 

So take heart, monied Republican believers – divert your dollars from the clutches of those traditional loony liberal strongholds, and let’s Make Vacations Great Again.

 – Dane Hicks is publisher of The Anderson County Review in Garnett, Ks.

Kansas Legislators: Build the Wall to keep out Kelly's new taxes

That vision which is stuck in the heads of many Kansas taxpayers – the one of Governor-elect Laura Kelly and her liberal Democrat henchmen storming into our state like marauding Mongols, ready to abscond with our daughters, thieve our livestock and pillory us with higher taxes for their new kingdom of governmental bloat – may be a little over-played. 

But then again, maybe only a little. 

As Kelly and her crew finish racking up their pre-inauguration Christmas list – bolstered by some $80 million to $138 million in extra Kansas tax dollars produced by the federal tax change windfall from last year – Kansas’ conservative lawmakers still in the majority in Topeka need to be thinking about how they plan to defend us and let us keep our own money. The term “Build A Wall” comes to mind. 

Make no mistake, Kelly intends to spend, and spend big. Rumors of another $90 million to go carte blanche to the ever-increasing tab for Kansas education; groundwork for expanding Medicaid in Kansas to a slew of new users at between 150 and 238 percent of the federal poverty level (in other words, those with incomes half again or more than twice what the feds actually consider “poor”). And while just 10 percent of all those extra Medicaid payments will get added to your state tax bill, the rest will billow into the ballooning federal deficit that will still be your responsibility – or most likely your kids and grandkids – to one day pay through their own taxes. 

Kelly’s plan compounds a situation of which most Kansans are unaware – that even though Kansas media relentlessly gnashed its teeth over “budget cuts” to education and poor people after Sam Brownback’s 2012 tax cut was initiated, the reality is that state spending overall continued to climb. To some government agencies reductions in their planned spending increases for next year are referred to in their press releases as “budget cuts,” and regurgitated by reporters and special interests until the public believes it. 

So gravity determines the following: Kansans are and will continue seeing a tax increase through the federal/state income tax incongruence even if legislators do absolutely nothing, because the way you pay your federal and state income tax right now amounts to an additional Kansas tax all on its own. 

Bear in mind this additional state/federal extraction of your dollars is above and beyond the $600 million state tax increase lumped onto your back last year by legislators, who eventually had to cover for Gov. Sam Brownback’s inability to make his 2012 tax cuts contingent on state budget cuts. Turning up the tap on your taxes has spewed forth even more money than planners forecast, with monthly revenue collections exceeding estimates for several months this year. 

Add it all up and what do you have? An incoming liberal governor with big spending plans and a nice pot of extra money that used to be yours just sitting there unguarded. Of course it won’t be enough to rescue the state from the legacy of Darth Brownback the way Kelly wants – not quite – it’ll require a little more. 

So our legislators – the ones who weren’t derailed in the election by the mob of Johnson County liberals with “I Hate Kobach” bumper stickers on their Land Rovers, are going to have to build a wall – a legislative wall that protects us Kansas outlanders from more and heavier taxes. They can do that by giving us back that federal windfall – like members of the Senate tried to do last year before their bill failed – and by barricading off the governor-elect’s options to raise additional taxes to make Kansas government even bigger and more expensive. Kelly’s plan kicks off when she takes over the governor’s office in January. Legislators – start mixing your mortar.

– Dane Hicks is president of Garnett Publishing, Inc., and editor of The Anderson County Review in Garnett, Kan.

The real test for adding 2 new city commissioners

EDITORIAL – Garnett City Commissioners should approach the recent voter-advised initiative of adding two new members to the governing body with a single litmus test – how does it help expand the city’s property tax base?

The present three members of the commission should feel under no rush to make any decision on the 537-483 advisory vote outcome until they’ve carefully weighed its pros and cons – and there are few pros and many cons.

If adding two commission seats doesn’t approach what  should be the city’s primary goal – expanding the city tax base by recruiting companies, adding jobs, developing housing and other assets to the local economy and lowering the property tax burden for all of us – then the obvious question is ‘why do it at all?’

As commissioners discussed at their Nov. 13 meeting, this is not a decision nor an action which should be entered into lightly, because it could very well radically affect the direction and the pace of city business from here on out. It’s worth adding that once you add two commissioners there’s no going back – no expansion of government ever decides later to trim its own size.

The added cost to pay two more commissioners – estimated at some $10,000 annually – is no small measure. The city presently sits in a position where it’s been cannibalizing its surplus utility funds for years in order to minimize increases in city property taxes. Ten thousand dollars, in city budget terms, is not a large sum – but it is still $100,000 in a decade. After listening to the recent budget hearings and to city manager Chris Weiner’s ideas for stabilizing city utility revenues, it’s clear cost increases matter and the running challenge of increasing the city’s tax base is paramount.

Another point worth considering: Where’s the beef? 
What issue has left vast segments of the citizenry unfairly unrepresented? What simmering controversy leaves city residents yearning for more and better airing of their views? The city’s police force isn’t running amok; there’s no rank and inappropriate nepotism; no sweetheart contracts awarded nefariously. City meetings aren’t filled with hoards of folks joined in some major controversy. Nothing seems to be on the public radar that hints at unfair conduct on the part of commissioners – nothing that two more paid office holders might solve. So the question begs an answer: What is to be gained?

         Meanwhile the possible negatives are a worry. More voices on the commission might provide more representation and more ideas; they might also provide a soapbox for those with limited agendas and for “bomb throwers” anxious only to disrupt and foster animosity. Others might simply be of no real value to city business, lending neither education nor expertise nor other talents, simply sitting in a chair at meetings and drawing a paycheck.

         The final analysis is that lacking some shining and defined benefit, city voters made a poor decision in voting for this change. If not in pursuit of the Holy Grail of development and tax base expansion, there’s simply no good reason to undertake it.

         City commissioners should take no action on this change for now, and instead conduct a series of public meetings with a single agenda item: to allow city residents who favor the change to explain why they feel it’s a good idea.

         Otherwise a 54 margin vote – a little more than half the state fire marshal’s defined occupancy of The Trade Winds restaurant in Garnett – is no reason to make such a pitfall-ridden change.

–Dane Hicks is publisher of The Anderson County Review in Garnett, Kan.

        

        

#Metoo and the Paul "Strip Bar" Davis dodge

LAWRENCE, KS – While crazy protesters won’t even let Republicans finish their salads in Washington, D.C., - area restaurants without bull-horning them out of their booths and out the front door, none of the ranks of the Lawrence, Ks., Social Justice Warrior nobility seem concerned about a Kansas congressional candidate who used to work for a guy that owned a strip bar.

The irony that Paul Davis, candidate in next week’s race for 2nd District U.S. Congress, has completely escaped the #Metoo Movement’s bitter comeuppance seems uncanny considering the nuclear eruptions that have felled so many others in the entertainment and political arenas. It makes one wonder if liberal protesters in Lawrence, who flare up over everything from gun laws to American flags to gender labeling, actually know what happens in a strip bar.

In the interests of debate and for those in the Lawrence SJW crowd who’ve been too busy getting their noses pierced or gazing catatonic at their cell phones to follow the Davis campaign, here’s the deal: at a strip bar, boys pay girls money to dance and climb brass poles – and to sit on their laps – pretty much naked.

Well, they’re probably not real brass poles – probably some kind of Rustoleum or something – but I digress…

It’s a universal tenet held by the feminist movement that while strippers themselves are hapless victims in the sex worker world, the real bad guys are the men who are their customers and the men who own the strip bars. In the world of pink hat wearing Women’s Marchers it’s okay to make money as a stripper, but if you’re a customer or if you make money as a strip bar owner, profiting from the exploitation of women, you should be heeled and hided to a barn door for abusing and objectifying them.

Davis was working for an area law firm in 1998 that represented the owner of a Kansas strip bar. Hard telling what kind of legal help a strip bar owner might need, but anyway, when local law enforcement started thinking someone was dealing meth out of the place, Davis got caught by law officers with a stripper on his lap in what’s called the VIP room.

Now, paying a stripper for a lap dance isn’t illegal and representing her boss in court isn’t either, and Davis was never connected to any drug activity. In his words, he was “in the wrong place at the wrong time.”

Yep – especially if you want to run for public office one day.

In 1998 nobody had heard of the #metoo movement, and the abuse and exploitation of women wasn’t nearly the cause celebre that it is today. But everyone had heard of the kind of trouble young girls can run into working at strip bars – drugs, stalkers, prostitution, rough customers who expect more than just a peep show. The men who support the industry and the club owners who make money through exploiting sex workers have always been in feminists’ crosshairs.

With that being the case, why no flaming opposition to Paul Davis’ campaign for U.S. Congress by those valiant and boisterous supporters of the women’s movement?

The answer obviously lies in Davis’ political party, not the facts of his personal history. As a Democrat, and someone who stumped tirelessly for Barack Obama in 2008 and 2012, none of those liberal Lawrence loud mouths dare call him out. He is, strip bar and all, one of their own.

That fact might lead one to believe that it’s politics, not these noble issues themselves, that really motivate Democrats and other liberals in their selective targeting. It’s a truth that takes more than a G-string to hide.

– Dane Hicks is editor/publisher of The Anderson County Review in Garnett, Ks.

Wind farm threat will make you love county zoning

ERIE, Kan. – Neosho County residents are finding out the hard way that having county zoning laws, even as encumbering as some people think they are, is the best way to save property values from the onslaught of federally-subsidized wind farms in many of Kansas’ rural areas.

It’s a sobering thought, and one that should make every rural land owner in Kansas run – not walk – to their county courthouse and ask for a copy of their local zoning regulations.

It’s that complete lack of local regulatory authority that no doubt made Neosho a prime target for Apex Clean Energy and its wind farm project. It’s a decision made years ago by county commissioners there and by residents in the county of 16,000 souls that lays neighbors wide open for whatever property disaster someone with money might want to foist upon them – from confined hog facilities to feed lots to chicken plants – you name it.

Those smaller threats that affect a limited number of adjacent landowners, some people may argue, are worth the risk of avoiding the rest of the restrictions of a county zoning plan. But a wind farm and its impact on broad stretches of acreage for miles and miles provides a Godzilla Moment for those who think local zoning is more trouble than it’s worth.

Even for counties that have local zoning, wind farm companies have become adept at weaving their way through those written rules to entrench themselves into countrysides where landowners either aren’t educated enough or are too apathetic or too hoodwinked by slick leasing agents to protect themselves. But a written framework of regulations is at least a point to build on – otherwise it’s like swimming in a lake and trying to get in a ski boat with no ladder.

A Neosho County landowner, semi-retired and in his 70s, recently told me he’d committed a fair portion of his assets to build his dream home a few years back in one of the county’s rural areas – a $500,000 investment – prior to Apex’s interest in building its wind farm there. His son spent a little more than $300,000 on his residence a mile or so away. Some nights they lose sleep over what happens if the wind farm is built, and offers bring only half of what they have put down on those homes someday when they’re ready to sell.

And all to encourage an industry renown for its inability to stand on its own two financial feet; one which relies completely on jury-rigged state and federal legislation; on power companies with a pistol put to their heads forced to purchase wind energy in order to support the industry’s builders – and all for electricity that can’t be adequately stored, that still has to be backed up by coal or nuclear-fired generation for times when the wind doesn’t blow, and whose turbines can’t even operate unless they’re connected to regular, non-wind grid power anyway.

But the illogic of wind power won’t stop those profiting from it’s subsidy-driven shell game from descending on places where the wind blows and promising the earth, wind and stars to property owners anxious to make money leasing their ground for those gigantic turbine sites. In Anderson County, where homeowners repelled a wind farm assault a few years ago, an uncanny number of lessors never even read the lease. If they had, they’d have run like a scalded cat.

In the absence of rural zoning, the only law that applies to lease signors in wind farm projects is the language of the lease designed for the profit of the company. When dissected line by line with the legal eye of a contract attorney, the one-sided nature of those leases becomes staggeringly apparent.
What an unconscionable position for past decades of county leaders to have left their rural residents.

–Dane Hicks is the president of Garnett Publishing, Inc., and publisher of The Anderson County Review weekly newspaper.