Before the Clay County Auditor started to do his report on the Birmingham Drainage District the voters started gathering signatures to get a State Audit. (see below) It appears that no one except the taxpayers wants to open this can of worms the state is trying to cover up.
The County audit brought out a major point. The Missouri State Auditor does not audit public levee and drainage district corporations. In spite of state law, the major reason the auditor doesn't want to auditor them would appear to be that levee and drainage district public corporations are not required by the Secretary of State of to have an agent, an office or even an address. With some 300 of these public corporations in the State, no one knows who is running these corporations. No one knows which ones are charging taxes or how much taxes or what is happening to the tax money.
About half of the levee and drainage districts are carried on the Secretary of States books as inactive because their term of life expired (i.e. dead corporations, as was the Birmingham Drainage District for 40 years. its charter expired in 1963)
At that point it should have been liquidated: "’If a municipal corporation’, declares the Supreme Court of the United States, ‘upon the surrender, or extinction in other ways, of its charter, is possessed of any property, a court of equity will equally take possession of it for the benefit of the creditors of the corporation.
The County audit also noted two other reasons why the State Auditor could not audit the Birmingham Drainage District.
1 A 1923 Supreme Court ruling which notes a state constitutional prohibition against a drainage district being formed within the city limits of Kansas City on a petition by landowners. However, we note the area encompassed by the Birmingham Drainage District was not annexed by Kansas City until 1962, long after the District had been formed. 2 A Howard County Circuit Court finding that a levee district which had gone out of existence due to the expiration of the specified term of corporate existence would be required to liquidate the district as a public corporation, pay its debts and return the rest of the money to the taxpayers. (Cause 214, Watts vs Gross, legal file item 27). However, we note the Clay County Circuit Court has on several occasions recognized the legal and ongoing existence of the Birmingham Drainage District and the taxpayer was a party in at least one of these actions.
STATE AUDITOR DOESN'T WANT TO GET INVOLVED WITH DEAD PUBLIC CORPORATIONS COLLECTING PUBLIC TAX MONEY