A trip to the Court House

Went to the courthouse yesterday to get dog tags for the puppies (okay they are large dogs but...) and to see if we could get our farm in CAUV which will drop our property taxes by about 80% in 2007 by designating our farm as a real working farm that produces more than $2500 worth of sales per year. Hell, I expect to be doing that weekly in another 2 or 3 years.

Going to the courthouse is always a bit strange. Eaton is the county seat of Preble County, OH. preble County has no more than 25,000 citizens living in it, it is a rural county where farming is KING. Miami University has more students than PC has citizens. What I am getting at is the county is small, the town is small and yet the courthouse requires everyone to pass by a Deputy Sheriff and through a metal detector. Why I must ask. is it because Eaton Ohio is on the A-list of places to blow up? Probably not and I suspect the metal detector and the cop (who must be paid for his time) come to us via Homeland Security and the PATRIOT Act.

So we walk through the detector and wave at the deputy (who seems way too happy) and go up the stairs to the 2nd floor and fill out forms for the dogs, get 2 new tags and a choice of what we want to use to affix the tags to the dog collars (S hooks, key rings or grommets) and pay the woman behind the desk money for the tags. Now we have legal dogs.

Than we ask about talking to someone about CAUV and she directs us behind the big counter to Rick Mowery. We talk to him and he sees no problem with the CAUV. He prints out a way cool satillite map of our farm from 1999 and gets the exact acrage and soil types of our land. Which Eugene and me are impressed with (we have both had to research soil types using the old soil books-tedious stuff). After telling us things look good he tells us that we should expect a car or truck through our Kitchen at some point in the future.

A car through the kitchen eh? We had already been warned that we should expect at least 2 fatalities on the road outside the house annually. Okaay... fatalities will not be fun but they would not be in the house. Now to hear that at least 3 cars have run through the kitchen in the past 40 years is a bit sobering.

It is disturbing to think one is so vulnerable. But if a car hits it is likely to be insured and since they would be at fault we would get $$$. Than we would be able to redo the kitchen and likely the deck free of charge. Be kind of like hitting the lottery except the gummint would not be getting a lot of the winnings in capital gains taxes (or whatever law they use for gambling winnings). Of course it would also mean not having a kitchen for at least a month and that would suck big time.


So I hope while we live here no one goes out of control and hits the house.