Ord Talk

To the Editor,

It’s my understanding that your local community is facing a $9.8 million dollar bond vote for school facilities. My home community faces similar issues and recently completed some new construction which contributed to tremendous financial problems.

I can’t speak to your specific plan but this is what I can tell you, based on my experiences with my local school district and others.

School boards tend to rubber stamp what their superintendents and teachers want, believing that is best for the kids. There is a tremendous amount of misinformation about how school districts can improve school facilities and a great deal of pressure from powerful financial interests ---architectural firms, consultants and the people that will sell the bonds. You should be very careful in dealing with them---they make money by influencing school administrators----they make money from schools borrowing money and make all kinds of promises regarding the outcome of your projects.

I am what most people would call a liberal activist. I teach part-time and am a strong supporter of public schools and teachers unions---but I’m deeply saddened to watch as school boards and teachers are hoodwinked into supporting building projects their districts can’t afford.

I’ve worked with activists from all shades of the political spectrum to fight unnecessary expenditures of taxes---waste--- and to assure that property taxpayers aren’t left holding the bag. Paul Dorr is a political consultant that helps to oppose many of these bond issues and I understand he is active in Ord. He is a political opposite of me but he also is fighting the same waste and has been attacked for it.

In our local community, the newspaper was forced to print retractions of at least one letter to the editor regarding Paul Dorr.

I hope you voters will examine all the issues carefully and bear in mind that it’s the teachers, not the buildings that do the teaching---and if your project ends up damaging the financial stability of the schools as it did in mine---it is teachers that will be cut---not the building.

Sincerely,

Bob McConnell

Washington, IA 52353

A Letter to VoxPop

See the edited version in the Quiz.

I am disappointed with the decision the Ord School Board of Education made to not give the patrons of the school district the choice to decide whether or not to provide the school with a new gymnasium at this time. Instead it seems they used the old politicians ploy of attaching a nonessential project to an essential project in an attempt to force the patrons to approve the nonessential project.

I feel that their decision might be considered irresponsible considering the seemingly imminent need for renovations to the high school. It seems the most responsible approach would be to offer the patrons a renovation project and a separate gymnasium project to vote on. I truly feel that the board would have no difficulty passing a bond for the renovation project, thus ensuring the continued safe operation of the school and who knows, without having it crammed down their throats, the patrons might very well approve the gymnasium project as well.

No one I have spoken with on this issue is opposed to the renovation of the high school building. The construction of a new gymnasium is a different story. During this time of economic uncertainty people are becoming increasingly careful to avoid excessive debt. With county indebtedness over forty million dollars, many residents are uncomfortable adding an expensive nonessential project to this debt.

As things stand, the bond will be one more issue to divide this community. If the bond fails, the patrons who opposed building a new gymnasium will be the idiots who don't want our children to be safe, comfortable, and happy. If the succeeds, the patrons who supported building a new gym will be the idiots who want to bankrupt the county. Either way, a no win situation.

Lana Kolar

Elyria NE.

Scream and shout ugly lies loud enough and long enough and soon, timid voters will fall into line.

That is clearly the strategy of the Our Kids 1st committee. Sadly, we really don’t believe that most of their committee members would normally act like this, if not being led by their radical NSEA union friends from Lincoln. This extremist NSEA has provided them with $2,000 cash and, if like in Kearney and Raymond Central, they are providing the proponent’s committee with yard signs, political consulting, and phone banking on top of the cash. And what is political consult-ing? Are high-paid public relations firms in Lincoln or Omaha writing the copy for the NSEA-backed Our Kids 1st committee? With this kind of commitment one must start to ask - “Who is really running Our Kids 1st committee?”

In our case, everything our consultant researches and writes for us is reviewed, edited and approved by CARE #5 committee before it goes out to the voters. Paul Dorr insists on it this way! After all, this is CARE #5’s campaign, NOT Paul Dorr’s!

Who is really dividing this community up? It is certainly not CARE #5!

We aren’t going to be distracted by answering every one of the OurKids1st committee’s nuanced lies. It would be a waste of your time and ours. But we will address some of the more bold ones, to give you an idea as to how they are hurting our community and neighborly relations while harming their own credibility in this campaign.

They call Paul Dorr a “High Paid” consultant.

They made that up. Paul Dorr told us he is willing to compare his 2008 paycheck with any management employee of the NSEA in Lincoln anytime!. His net business income for his campaign consulting work last year was $31,744. (He has offered to bring copies of his Schedule C from last year’s tax return - when he visits Ord next week.) With his wife and large family still at home, do you see this income as “high paid”? The proponents lied!

In a recent radio ad the proponents said Paul Dorr “intentionally” distorts facts and figures. Dorr tells us they have no evidence to demonstrate that aggressive false charge, other than more false accusations made mostly from sore losers, who themselves have no evidence.

On their website, they have recently stated Paul Dorr joined with other parties to sue the state of Minnesota. Paul Dorr has never been a litigant to any dispute in any court in Minnesota, state or federal. They lied again!

Sore losers in a campaign in Minnesota made this same charge of intentionally lying against one of Dorr’s clients during a school bond campaign. They filed charges in the Office of Administrative Hearings (an administrative court in Minnesota) on seventeen separate campaign statements. One of the statement’s made by Dorr’s client (against Dorr’s advice) was that the client (Victor Niska - a retired public school janitor) had once been offered a bribe by the lead architect on the proposed new school building. Wow! That’s a bold statement to make during a campaign. Surely Niska (Dorr’s client) was lying.

Off to administrative court it went.

“Nowww Dorr’s clients would be found guilty of intentionally lying during a campaign in a least a few of these seventeen charges….at least enough to tie it back to Dorr,” the bankers, architects and Superintendents must have thought.

What did the three judge panel find, after reviewing the evidence to all seventeen charges? The Complaint was DISMISSED on all charges. The sore losers could not prove one of their false accusations. But don’t believe CARE #5 or Paul Dorr. Check it out for yourself here and especially here.

The court had reached the same conclusion the majority of voters had already reached – that the committee telling the truth in this Minnesota campaign was Paul Dorr’s client!

More so, Finding of Fact No. 31 in the court ruling above found this, “In October of 1991, one of the partners of SGN Architects had four tickets to game 6 of the World Series between the Minnesota Twins and the Atlanta Braves. Mr. Nyberg [sic. of SGN Architects] offered tickets to the game free of charge to Dr. Jim Smith, Superintendent of the Westonka School District and John Klein, Superintendent of Triton schools. Because SGN was bidding for work with both school districts, Mr. Nyberg offered the tickets to Dr. Smith and Mr. Klein in order to gain favor with them.”

The architect was offering bribes to secure school building contracts and Dorr’s client proved it. Are we implying the architect from Lincoln has bribed Ord School Superintendent Max Kroger? Not at all. What we are saying is that CARE #5 is committed to the same thing our consultant Paul Dorr is - telling the truth. The truth alone does enough damage to the proponents cause, in the eyes of the majority of voters! And in his client’s case in Minnesota, an administra-tive court proved the sore loser’s accusations of Dorr’s client lying - were false. Even to the point, the court agreed the architects were offering bribes.

But here’s where the big government and bond dealer Bullies in Minnesota can `work over’ the little people of any community!

What would you do if you and your friends had to spend your own money (out of pocket) to campaign up against multimillion dollar special interests and against the large amount of taxpayer money that can be spent in so-called “information” campaigns by the schools, and you had to campaign against the local media (who are too intimidated to stand up to the special interests) - and yet the voters believed your message and you still won by defeating the extravagant proposal – and then the proponents sue you in administrative court making a series of false accusations, all under the authority of a highly questionable state law?

What would you do? Now you have to raise thousands of more dollars to hire an attorney to defend yourself against these false charges – as Niska had to do. And then you defeat them again, this time in court!

What would you then do if after the proponents have been defeated by the voters and by the court, they wait a few months and then turn around and schedule another election? Many would give up facing such bullying! Most of Dorr’s client don’t.

The law in Minnesota is not in place to hold liars accountable. It is there, mostly to oppress the Free Speech rights of honest taxpayers. By the mere presence of this unconstitutional law - opponents can be financially depleted just for the “privilege” of having to defend themselves against the false accusations made by the sore losers.

Keep in mind the NSEA-backed ad running in Ord said they regretted Nebraska didn’t have such a law like Minnesota’s. Is the Our Kids 1st committee and the NSEA effectively saying that want to bully Ord citizens too? Again, this Minnesota law is used primarily to suppress the Free Speech rights of taxpayers. It’s the protect the Bullies law! In their state, Minnesota voters should decide which campaign is telling the truth, not a costly administrative court

.

Victor Niska and several other Minnesota citizen’s committees had enough and hired an attorney to sue the state of Minnesota in Federal Court over this unconstitutional infringement. They only did it after another sore losing Superintendent was threatening to sue yet another citizen’s committee. Meanwhile, Niska’s attorney told Dorr that a similar oppressive law in Washington State has already been struck down by their courts.

So when the NSEA-backed OurKids1st committee says in their ad that Dorr’s clients sued for the right to lie during these campaigns. This, itself, is an ugly lie!

They sued for the right not to be bullied by sore-losers after defeating them in a fair and square campaign.

Ask yourself, why it is the Ord school district and proponent’s committee need to go to such great lengths to fleece taxpayers for securing routine information and to aggressively and falsely vilify us and our consultant . Why do they go to such great lengths to exaggerate the problems with the State Fire Marshal’s report?

We don’t oppose reasonable and prudent improvements to the Ord High School, but we do resist a campaign to take a few low-dollar needs and exaggerate them into big profits contracts for special interests! Especially one built on a high-pitched campaign of compounding lies.

Credibility is everything in this campaign! We hope you now see where the proponents are fast losing theirs. In the coming days, CARE #5 hopes to earn it in your eyes from the truthfulness of our message.

Sincerely,

CARE #5 committee

P.S. Though a sideline to our upcoming Town Hall meeting, Paul Dorr is scheduled to join us in Thursday evening, October 22. Listen to his friendly and straight-forward answers to the toughest questions the proponents can throw at him and decide for yourself.