My name is Ron Collins, and I am sixty-three years of age. I live in Texas County (OK) in the town of Texhoma. For the past nine years I have resided in an old single-wide mobile home in which no one else ever has any interest or stake for decades prior to my acquiring it, installed on private property which does not belong to me and for which I pay a monthly rental fee by arrangement with its owner.
After these nine years of having received no contact or correspondence of any kind from the county or any other official body regarding my status as resident of my own home, all of a sudden out of the blue this morning I received a call from the county assessor's office, accusing me of being deficient in some tax obligation I never had any knowledge of, and threatening to sell my house out from under me if I do not pay some unspecified amount to them. They claim to have sent someone to my home to discuss these alleged obligations with me some four years ago, and that at this time I had promised to 'come in' and provide some kind of paperwork for their needs. I have no knowledge, memory or documentation of any such visit by this agency at that time or any other, and have to assume that the assessor's office is lying to me in claiming that any such meeting had ever occurred.
My strong suspicion is that this tactic out of the county assessor's office has nothing to do with any legitimate claim it might wish to make upon me, but that these maneuvers have now been directed by influential parties within either the county sheriff's office or the district attorney's office, or both, owing to stances I had taken in opposition to their processing of allegations made against me in the past on unrelated matters. The county assessor herself made the preposterous claim that she is only trying to comply with the law and that 'we treat everyone equally here', a claim which my fifteen years spent in this intensely corrupt region has made impossible to take seriously.
I have no money other than the minimum required to maintain a modest standard of living, no means to acquire legal counsel to assist me in countering such hostile maneuvers, and have only the less than a thousand dollars a month I receive from social security retirement income on which to live or conduct business.
The intent here, I believe, is for the county's administration to use this obscure and trivial matter against me in order to make me homeless, having been un-equipped to defend myself against such an arbitrary move made against me now rather than at any time over the past nine years, during which the county might have approached me in good faith and sought in good faith, at any point, to remedy this difficulty they are having with making their records say what the local-boss system hereabouts wants them to say.
Instead they chose to call me during the holidays after all this time, and threaten to have me evicted from my home, offering no recourse other than that I accept a meeting with someone from their office, a meeting of a type they claim to have taken place years ago, but which claim is absolutely false. They refuse to say what amount they may be seeking to collect, what means or time frame I might have to make any such payment, and only inform me that I could be evicted and my home sold out of my possession if I do not comply.
What exactly it is I am to comply with, they have not deigned to disclose. Such is the nature of this type of qusai-official and targeted extortion.
I require some kind of legal assistance in order to undertake whatever countermeasures may be necessary in order to cause this county agency to cease and desist from these vague and groundless claims against me, and to defend my home and my right to live in it from these arbitrary power-plays made by the true powers in this county, the sheriff and district attorney, specifically, simply because they believe they have some score to settle with me.
There can be no other possible explanation for the nature or timing of these threats, after nine years' silence from the county as though it never had any interest at all in where I choose to reside or how, until now.
Thank you for speaking out Jessica
To whom it concerns:
My name is Ron Collins, and I am sixty-three years of age. I live in Texas County (OK) in the town of Texhoma. For the past nine years I have resided in an old single-wide mobile home in which no one else ever has any interest or stake for decades prior to my acquiring it, installed on private property which does not belong to me and for which I pay a monthly rental fee by arrangement with its owner.
After these nine years of having received no contact or correspondence of any kind from the county or any other official body regarding my status as resident of my own home, all of a sudden out of the blue this morning I received a call from the county assessor's office, accusing me of being deficient in some tax obligation I never had any knowledge of, and threatening to sell my house out from under me if I do not pay some unspecified amount to them. They claim to have sent someone to my home to discuss these alleged obligations with me some four years ago, and that at this time I had promised to 'come in' and provide some kind of paperwork for their needs. I have no knowledge, memory or documentation of any such visit by this agency at that time or any other, and have to assume that the assessor's office is lying to me in claiming that any such meeting had ever occurred.
My strong suspicion is that this tactic out of the county assessor's office has nothing to do with any legitimate claim it might wish to make upon me, but that these maneuvers have now been directed by influential parties within either the county sheriff's office or the district attorney's office, or both, owing to stances I had taken in opposition to their processing of allegations made against me in the past on unrelated matters. The county assessor herself made the preposterous claim that she is only trying to comply with the law and that 'we treat everyone equally here', a claim which my fifteen years spent in this intensely corrupt region has made impossible to take seriously.
I have no money other than the minimum required to maintain a modest standard of living, no means to acquire legal counsel to assist me in countering such hostile maneuvers, and have only the less than a thousand dollars a month I receive from social security retirement income on which to live or conduct business.
The intent here, I believe, is for the county's administration to use this obscure and trivial matter against me in order to make me homeless, having been un-equipped to defend myself against such an arbitrary move made against me now rather than at any time over the past nine years, during which the county might have approached me in good faith and sought in good faith, at any point, to remedy this difficulty they are having with making their records say what the local-boss system hereabouts wants them to say.
Instead they chose to call me during the holidays after all this time, and threaten to have me evicted from my home, offering no recourse other than that I accept a meeting with someone from their office, a meeting of a type they claim to have taken place years ago, but which claim is absolutely false. They refuse to say what amount they may be seeking to collect, what means or time frame I might have to make any such payment, and only inform me that I could be evicted and my home sold out of my possession if I do not comply.
What exactly it is I am to comply with, they have not deigned to disclose. Such is the nature of this type of qusai-official and targeted extortion.
I require some kind of legal assistance in order to undertake whatever countermeasures may be necessary in order to cause this county agency to cease and desist from these vague and groundless claims against me, and to defend my home and my right to live in it from these arbitrary power-plays made by the true powers in this county, the sheriff and district attorney, specifically, simply because they believe they have some score to settle with me.
There can be no other possible explanation for the nature or timing of these threats, after nine years' silence from the county as though it never had any interest at all in where I choose to reside or how, until now.
Ron Collins
Texhoma, Oklahoma
(580)461-6728