Kansas wildfire victims look to lawmakers for help restoring a key asset: their fencing
14 January 2022
Published by https://www.kansascity.com/
USA – On the morning of Dec. 15, Stephanie Dickerson, a rancher in Paradise, told her husband, “If there’s a fire today, this is going to be really bad.”
High speed winds, combined with extremely dry conditions across western Kansas, turned Paradise into an inferno. By mid-day, the Dickerson family was surrounded by flames while trying to help a neighbor load horses into a trailer. The hurricane-force winds knocked over the truck and trailer carrying her husband and son. It nearly upended her own car as they drove to a field to safety.
Over the next few hours they watched as their home, their family ranch, Bar S, and neighborhood were destroyed.
“We at least got everyone accounted for,” Dickerson said. “But the flames were everywhere.”
About 160,000 acres in parts of Russell, Ellis, Osborne and Rooks counties burned. Homes, ranches, farms and livestock.
Clinton Laflin’s home was spared from the fire but he lost cattle.
“I can’t describe the feeling of having a fire with 105-mile-an-hour winds coming straight out. That’s one of the most unnerving feelings I’ve ever had,” said Laflin, a rancher in Russell and livestock production specialist at Kansas State University. “It just, it moves so fast that people didn’t really have time to react.”
Nearly a month after the Four County Fire, the Dickersons and their neighbors face the task of rebuilding. That includes replacing hundreds of miles of fencing that were destroyed.
A bill in the Kansas Legislature would help ease the cost by providing a sales tax exemption for materials needed to repair or replace fencing damaged by wildfires. It would also allow refunds for materials already purchased.
This measure would amend an existing law to ensure there is no expiration date to the exemption for wildfire victims. The law as it is now only applies to wildfires that occurred in 2016 and 2017.
Unlike houses, fencing is not covered by insurance, said Rep. Troy Waymaster, a Bunker Hill Republican who sponsored the bill, during a hearing Wednesday in the House Committee on Taxation.
But rising inflation and global supply chain disruptions are also making materials harder to obtain, Dickerson said.
“A bunch of barbed-wire manufacturers are waiting on some parts for their machines to be able to actually manufacture barbed wire, so it’s been really hard to get that. But also what we can find when we can find it, I know us personally and a lot of neighbors, most of us don’t have houses or vehicles or barns or anything like that to get stuff and store it,” she said.
Rep. Adam Smith, a Weskan Republican, who chairs the House Committee on Taxation and is a farmer and rancher himself, grew emotional during a Paradise resident’s testimony.
“To me, this request is something pretty insignificant compared to the loss that you have suffered, but it’s something important that we can do, a small bit of assistance we can help with,” Smith said to Paradise resident Chris Pelton.
The committee will work through the bill Tuesday to ensure the sales tax exemption will not expire before passing it to the House as a whole. In the meantime, victims of the fire will continue the slow rebuilding process.
“You don’t expect something like this to happen to you until it does,” Laflin said. “Costs like these are not necessarily costs you see coming.”
