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Wyandotte County was experiencing severe weather at 5:55 p.m. Tuesday, with lightning and rain reported.
The National Weather Service issued a significant weather advisory about a storm moving through the area with wind gusts up to 50 mph.
Heavy rainfall is part of the storm. The weather service advised residents not to drive vehicles through flooded roadways.
Frequent cloud to ground lightning is occurring with this storm.
For more weather information, see www.weather.gov/kc.
Case remanded to tax court
The J.C. Penney store at 10904 Stadium Parkway, Kansas City, Kan., was the topic of a decision last Friday in the Kansas Court of Appeals.
The Penney Corp. was appealing the appraised value of its store in the Village West area of Kansas City, Kan.
Wyandotte County appraised the store’s value at $7,925,000 for the 2011 tax year, while Penney’s said the value was $4,950,000, according to court documents. The store has 99,146 square feet of retail space on 8.48 acres of commercial property.
In March of 2014, the Court of Tax Appeals agreed with the Unified Government that the appraised value of $7,925,000 was “fully supported.”
Penney’s appealed the decision to the Kansas Court of Appeals, which last week reversed and remanded the COTA ruling.
Penney’s argued in its appeal that COTA erred in denying Penney’s earlier motion for recusal, and claimed it was denied a hearing before an impartial panel of judges. Wyandotte County maintained that the panel was impartial. The basis for the request for recusal stemmed from some previous cases in another county not involving the Penney property, but involving another property with the same attorney with some of the same judges.
Two of the three judges from this 2014 case are no longer with COTA, according to court documents.
The Kansas Court of Appeals reversed COTA’s order on the value of the property and sent the case back for rehearing before different COTA judges. The Court of Appeals did not rule on whether Penney’s other claims had merit.
If the UG’s valuation eventually stands, it would mean a payment of around $336,000 for that tax year. But Penney’s wants about 40 percent off the UG’s valuation figure.
The Target store next door to Penney’s had an assessed value of about $8.6 million in 2011.
The Unified Government, in the past few years, has been making contracts with some firms that have large commercial properties, and has been requiring payments in lieu of taxes, instead of property taxes.
Police are investigating an apparent double homicide about 2:03 p.m. today in the 1900 block of Quindaro Boulevard.
Two men in their mid-20s were found dead from apparent gunshot wounds, according to a spokesman for the Kansas City, Kan., Police Department.
The incident is under investigation by the Kansas City, Kan., Police Department’s Criminal Investigations Division, which is encouraging anyone with information to call the TIPS hotline at 816-474-TIPS.