By Tricia Pursell
The Daily Item
May 29, 2009 05:19 am
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MIDDLEBURG -- The Snyder County commissioners' recent unanimous decision to demote the county's chief assessor is supported by a Beaver Springs pastor, who said his dealings with her are proof of her worsening track record.
Denny Mallonee, pastor of Faith Baptist Church, believes the demotion of Kimbra Napier from chief assessor to full-time field assessor has no connection to an unpaid property tax allegation surrounding Prothonotary Teresa Berger in 2007.
The commissioners on Tuesday also denied there was any connection.
"It had nothing to do with what happened," Mallonee said on Thursday, adding that the end result of the controversy proved that Berger had never legally owed any taxes on an uninhabitable building on her property. Napier reported in 2007 that Berger had failed to pay $5,000 in taxes on the vacant property over a nine-year period, and the former board of commissioners unsuccessfully sought the back taxes.
The incumbent commissioners took office in 2008.
Instead, their decision to demote her last week based on her missing required deadlines, insubordination and providing inaccurate information to the board is on point with what he experienced in professional dealings with Napier, Mallonee said.
"I have been pressing the commissioners to dismiss her because of what she's done to us," he said Thursday.
On May 3, 2007, Mallonee's church obtained a radio tower on Shade Mountain, donated by Frosty Towers Inc., of West Plains, Mo. As a nonprofit organization, his church is not required to pay taxes on property it uses for church purposes. The church also purchased from Frosty Towers a genset and portable building by the tower.
The Snyder County tax office continued to contact Frosty Towers for payment of real estate taxes for a year after the deal with the church was made, according to Blake Bowers, of Frosty Towers, who wrote a letter to the editor to the Snyder County Times in November, complaining of his dealings with the tax assessment office. Each time he was contacted by them, he sent them the documentation of the sale, he said.
"I just now got off the phone with the Snyder County tax assessor," Bowers wrote. "A rather abrasive woman who insists it is my responsibility to take more time out of my day to pull that paperwork out of our archives and fax it to her yet again."
Napier admitted she knew the tower belonged to the church, and the property on which it sits belongs to the state, Bowers wrote, but she told him she would not contact the church for information.
From this letter, Mallonee said his church realized there was a problem, and the church's engineer contacted the assessment office to make sure it had all the necessary documentation.
The 80-foot tower and block building were assessed at $1,900, Mallonee said, more than the average home.
Several years earlier, Mallonee said his church bought a house next door and then filed for an assessment appeal so the property could be tax-exempt. But according to Mallonee, Napier refused to tell them when the hearing date would be. "Her response is that you don't have to be there,'"" he said. "She denied me due process."
The county later scheduled the tower and property for a sheriff's sale without notifying the church, Mallonee said. The property is owned by the state Department of Conservation and Natural Resources.
"We tried to be as gracious as we could, but we got to the point that enough was enough," Mallonee said. "This lady has misused her office to fulfill her personal agenda. A person in public office should not do that."
On Tuesday, Mark J. Harris, a county Republican committee member, said Napier's demotion is directly related to an alleged "hit list" of employees that majority commissioners Joe Kantz and Malcolm Derk were accused of having when they took office.
Napier at that time said Kantz and Derk "were given a negative impression of me before I ever came into office."
She said the Republican commissioners had reprimanded her for sending an improper e-mail.
Derk said Thursday her failure to file homestead-farmstead information for the county played a role in her demotion.
A revised classification level and a 37.5-hour work week, in addition to a period of probation, took effect for Napier on May 20.
Wendy K. Cook, a full-time employee in the assessment office, was named acting chief assessor.
n E-mail comments about this article to tpursell@dailyitem.com.
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