Editor:

Now that Valentine’s Day and the vast celebration of my birthday are nothing but good memories, I am back to a she-bear-with-cubs temperament with regard to the mention in the Feb. 5 Citizen that the Northgate School District wants to solicit permission to raise my taxes by “up to 3.1 mills.” Don’tcha love Mr. [Dan] O’Keefe’s worrying that “without a sizeable tax increase, Northgate is on target to completely deplete its reserve fund balance by 2013.” After I quit crying for the plight in which Northgate finds itself, blew my nose, and washed my face, I started having dreams that Mr. O’Keefe was worrying about the depletion of my fixed income and was seeking for my husband and me a “sizable” tax refund of my school taxes for the past three years.

Some people don’t have a reserve fund balance: they’ve lost their jobs, had their hours cut, have medical bills beyond their means, etc. And if they did happen to have a reserve fund balance, they would have to spend out of it until the next income.

What infuriates me is that the picture I get is that two elements are running the zoo: the students and the 10-toed sloths. Why do I say this? For more than one year, there has been in the past a school board member -- yes, a school board member -- who had not paid his taxes. For many years, you read of the same properties with the same owners not paying their taxes. You can read of one owner owning many properties and paying no taxes on any of them. You can have one owner owning multiple properties and (evidently) deciding every year which one of them not to pay taxes on like Russian roulette.

I’m told that some of the back taxes have been retrieved. I would like to insist, somehow, that the amount of monies recovered be in print in The Citizen and that that figure be compared in the same print to the amount actually owed. I’m conjecturing that since the same names and same properties are in the paper at the end of the years, none or not all of these delinquent taxes are actually being collected. I think the people who are paying taxes have a right to know who is not collecting these monies.

Another question: The people allegedly retrieving these taxes - are they being paid to (not) do a total job?

Virginia Miranda
Bellevue