The following is an email that we received from Roger Kirwin, the director of Old Bedford Village regarding the efforts to save the Village over the past few months.The Reenactor Post is proud to be a supporter of OBV and we salute them on their success in keeping the doors open!
Dear Jim,
Good to see you and all the lads this past weekend, I know you’re always looking for some snow for a more authentic feel to a Russian winter, but I didn’t hear anyone complaining about the sunshine!
It’s been a real year of turmoil and doubt here at OBV. Along with the economic recession, it was one of the wettest seasons I’ve ever seen in PA ( I thought I was back in Blighty this Summer with all the rain) we saw numbers of visitors dwindle, often quite substantially.
The big joke in the office was that there was no need to consult the ‘Farmer’s Almanac’ this year to see what the weather was going to do on any given weekend – just get the OBV special events list for 2009 and that would be a guarantee that it would rain that weekend!
Of course, the big one was the property tax issue.
The local newspaper, the Bedford Gazette had been carrying a local interest story for some time about a pending property tax reassessment in the county. Somewhat remarkably, the last property tax reassessment Bedford County PA had  been subject to was back in 1957! No doubt about it, a review was due and it was interesting to note that several ‘generations’ of county commissioners had decided not to grab that bull by the horns and implement reassessment… until the Bedford County School Board threatened to take legal action against them late last year.
And so, the reassessment commenced. It’s hard to convey the outrage that the rank and file of Bedford voiced when their properties were reassessed in one fell swoop from 1957 values to 2009 values. All the time, I was hearing about folks getting property tax increases of thousands of percent and the understandable distress it was causing them, when their annual property tax threatened their homes and farms (it should be noted that Bedford County PA is a rural county of 50,000 people, currently lying 3rd from top out of 67 counties in the state unemployment tables). Just a few weeks ago, the county’s citizens also learned that the county had debts totalling $49.7 million, considered by many to be excessive for a county this size and with a poor economy.
The problem started for OBV in February this year. Feb 6th to be exact. Opening the mail at my desk one morning, I was surprised to see a property tax bill. As OBV is and always has been a 501(c)(3) ‘Not for profit educational Museum’, I immediately assumed that the bill had been sent in error.
So, I decide to call the chief assessor to clear the problem up and get back to working on the forthcoming season’s programming at the Village. At this point, I want you to consider what it’s like to live in a small rural county, where everyone knows everyone, when you go downtown, you leave the keys in the ignition, we never lock our doors at night etc. so to be told by the chief assessor’s assistant that the chief assessor was too busy to talk to me and would not be able to return my call for ” 2 Months”, call it a hunch, but I knew something wasn’t right!
I immediately called the county commissioner’s office to find out what was happening – OBV, a registered non profit, on the IRS website as tax exempt, never previously paid property tax in it’s entire 33 year existence, recognized by the state of PA as an educational museum – what was going on?
The commissioner I talked to said that he didn’t know anything about it! Wow!. Talk about the tail wagging the dog!
I pressed on deeper into the local political circles to get answers. It became very interesting. Of course blissfully ignorant at the time that the county was in such debt, I couldn’t figure out why OBV was being taxed.
It didn’t take too long, in fact a call to our accountants, before I began to put a picture together. You see, just because the Federal Government and the State of Pennsylvania says you’re tax exempt, that doesn’t mean that the county that the non profit resides is in, will exempt them. According to our accountants (a big firm who handle accounting for local counties and are consequently well read when it comes to these kind of things) they said that under PA Act 55, Bedford County was within it’s rights to tax OBV for it’s property! The conversation ended with the accountant saying that he was completely unaware of any other county in PA applying a property tax to a 501(c)(3) but the law was evidently one the side of the county. It was his closing statement which really brought it home to me. If this $18,000 per year property tax goes through – which of course it had, even though the first we knew about it was when I opened the mail that fateful day, then due to the current financial position of OBV, we should consider a plan for CLOSURE.
Gulp!
A bit of background here, which a lot of people are not really aware of, even in the local community. OBV was started in 1976 to mark the bicentennial. ’76 was a time in the county when unemployment raged at 20%, so the idea of using grants from the Feds to create a log cabin ‘colonial’ Village was a great idea to reduce unemployment and create tourism in a county which needed all the help it could get.
All was well in the Village during those formative years. Grant money coming in, jobs for all etc. but when the money dried up in the early 80s and the place had to stand on it’s own 2 feet, reality set in and so did accumulating debt. You can only go to the well (bank) so many times before the well is dry – and that’s what happened at OBV and oh so many other historical sites. Gradually, the debt is such that it takes all the working capital being generated just to support the debt. It’s a downward spiral, and that’s the story here. I call it living with the “sins of the father.”
Beginning to get the idea of how a ‘paltry’ $18k each year could tip the apple cart? Heavy debt means monthly repayments to the bank. Stop those repayments and it’s close the creaking door for good. That’s business. Throw in an extra payment and that fine line between success and failure becomes life or death for a business, museum, county , country etc. etc.
So having been on the sharp end of a ‘revival’ at OBV for the past 8 years, paying the bankers their ‘pound of flesh’ each month, beginning to introduce new programs, new faces, attracting more visitors, building up a strong board of directors etc. we were not exactly on a roll, but we were making steady, cautious progress.
Back to the propert tax issue, what followed was in essence a campaign of public awareness.
I harnessed any, and every media and told them of our plight. From Pittsburgh, to Harrisburg to Philadelphia, press releases went out and the media honed in on this quaint little village with all the living history, education programs and the threat of closure.
We started number crunching to try to determine just what OBV contributed to the local community and economy. That was a tough one. it really needed people out there with clip boards conducting interviews, but we didn’t have either time nor money to conduct such surveys. Instead, using PA state archives for demographics of visitors to state historic sites, we determined that visitors to OBV spent an estimated $2million in the local economy in restaurants, gas, hotels, local retailers etc. There really wasn’t anything else in the county which would make people pull off the PA turnpike of I-99 for touristic purposes, so as the chief attraction in Bedford County, we felt content with that figure.
And so the media circus began to roll… press releases, radio interviews, newspaper articles, TV news, the plight of OBV went regional. The county commissioners split themselves between those for taxing OBV and to hell with the consequences, and those quietly supporting OBV. Some of the remarks made by the commissioners were nothing short of comical. I think some of those comments made by one of them in particular, secured much grass roots support for us.
Finally, we got a date for appeal, by which time we’d secured the assistance of an out of town law firm. It was a tough job trying to find a lawyer who didn’t say “What?? never heard of that” when we told them of the situation, such was the rarity of the case in question, i.e. that of taxing a non profit. Our lawyers billed us as the only museum in the state of Pennsylvania being subject to such a tax.
On the day the appeal was to be heard (10.29.09) in front of the three county commissioners, the OBV board of directors, supporters and lawyers filed into the Bedford Count courthouse and took their seats. We waited for the commissioners to show up, which 2 of them did. We all waited for the third…. no show. So with only 2 commissioners present (no chance of a vote here) our legal council presented the case and I read out my prepared statement outlining OBV’s presence in the community, it’s educational programs and it’s slender financial situation.
The meeting really couldn’t go any further, so we disbursed and were promptly scooped up by the media waiting outside.
When a reporter from Channel 6 asked me to comment on a statement made a few minutes previously by one of the commissioners, out of my earshot, namely that OBV was taxed because it could not provide evidence to the county that it was tax exempt, I was initially stunned that someone would make such a false accusation, but then I ‘clicked’ that if this was the best defense they could offer, then we were beginning to win. Shifting the blame was the name of the game.
More media blitz followed and we began to drive the issue home. Word went out to the living history community (a very strong pressure group for historical matters) and in a timed response, the commissioners were flooded with letters. Yet more letters of support appeared in the ‘letters to the editor’ pages of the Bedford Gazette and Altoona Mirror. The campaign was in full swing and the commissioners had to make a decision to either uphold the tax or rescind it.
I’d started to attend the Tuesday morning commissioners meetings to see how local government worked. For the most part, the meetings revolved around the alleged injustices associated with the property tax reassessment, the newly formed Bedford County Taxpayers Association (no political affiliations) doing sterling work in representing many of the people affected by the sharp increases in property tax assessment. No doubt about it, OBV was becoming the second front. We were not going to take this unfair tax lying down and this fact was becoming very apparent to everyone.
Then, unexpectedly ,one Tuesday morning at the 11.10.09 weekly commissioners meeting, a motion was proposed by one of the commissioners who had previously been so apparently anti OBV, that the property tax on the Village should be dropped. To my relief, a second commissioner seconded the motion and the tax was rescinded at around 10.15am that morning!
Relief all around. Now it was time to send in the cavalry (Lawyers) for the pursuit, for what guarantee do we have that this could not be resurrected at a later date? And that, as of today, 11.19.09, is where the story rests. The abhorrent tax had been rescinded, OBV takes in a sharp intake of breath and we lick our wounds, financial and otherwise. Good legal representation comes at a goodly price.
It’s been a roller coaster ride over the past few months. I really don’t think people know just how close OBV came to disaster in this case. There’s a lot of people to thank for their support which brought about this happy conclusion to what has been a miserable affair. On behalf of the OBV board of Directors, I would like to thank them all for the letters, e mails and ‘phone calls.
In truth, I had the time of my life fighting this one. It was such a shame the stakes were so high, and I really didn’t want to go down with the ship.
One thing’s for sure, as living historians, we cannot afford to leave the preservation of history in the political arena and assume it will be well cared for.
Roger.
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