Remarks on Bond Question One
Independence City Council, November 2, 2026

I am John Hajicek.  I live on Saddle Ridge Drive.  I also have homes at the end of Liberty Street and on Independence Avenue, where we are losing both liberty and independence.  I am not a complainer.  I have not spoken before this city council since 1998.

I am opposing the $20 million tax on the residents of Independence for several buildings.  You are not “saving” history, because it is a history nobody here knows or understands.

I have a graduate education in economics, but I am arguably the best-paid American preservationist, and I have lived in Independence since 1988.  So this is not a question about love for history or love for Independence or love for economic sensibilities.  I have personally restored homes, and I have a specialty in historic sites and famous architectural artifacts of Smithsonian quality.

But your appeal to saving history is trickery.  History does not mandate that this city tax its citizens so that it can use the money for waste, fraud, corruption, and inefficiency.  History actually teaches that low taxation is better for humans.

The residents of Independence deserve to keep their earnings and fix their own houses, not give the money to the rich to fix empty houses from a bygone Gilded Age that the peasantry could only dream about in 1881 and 1899, and is only useful for dreaming about today.

$20 million divided by the 50,000 or so households in Independence is about $400 per household, before interest.  And we are promised a free ticket to visit the houses, like their housekeepers and other servants and peasants.  This would be paid through property taxes over as many as twenty years.  Property taxes are also paid indirectly when you rent, get a haircut, go to daycare, or buy gas or groceries because those businesses have property taxes to pay through ownership or rent.  All taxes and tariffs are paid by consumers.

So five buildings, $20 million.

First, the Truman Memorial Building, 1926.  Truman was nothing in 1926, the building was a memorial for the WWI veterans and the we changed it to memorialize the WWII president. It is Georgian revival, when we fought the Revolutionary war as a rebellion against Georgian-revival and this taxation.

Second, Fire Station Number One, 1928, not the 1858 actual first fire station.  Are we all treated like your children chasing fire trucks?  That is an obsolete building from 1928, not even an antique yet, though fairly cute, more than one hundred years newer than the city.  About fifteen percent of our houses are older than that fire station.

Third, Bingham-Wagonner, 1899 mansion on top of an 1852 house.

I want a tax abatement for all African American slave descendants because Bingham was a slaveholder.  I think there is a great irony in now taxing African Americans a second time to pay for the 1899 mansion built on top of his 1852 house, since they already paid once for this exact same house.  This is Italianate architecture?  The Italians preserve their own architecture that is 6,000 years old and in this villa style that is 600 years old.  It is no servant’s responsibility in a free economy.

Fourth, Vaile Mansion, 1881, on Liberty Street.  In regard to Vaile, there is a similar irony in that the mansion was paid for by Harvey Vaile scamming the government on the backs of hardworking American taxpayers, and now you want to do it to us a second time for the exact same house.  Vaile just appeared in Kansas City as a lawyer nobody even wanted to share an office with.  His wife did not want to live in the house with him.  Suddenly he scammed the government by charging $50,000 to deliver mail that fit in the leg of his boot—that as when ordinary Missouri laborers earned a dollar or two a day.   He used the stolen money to buy plantations and ranches.  So he went to trial in Washington and his trials are 10,000 printed pages.  If anyone here wants to “save history,” they should read the history before taxing me for his paint and air conditioner.  And this is “Second Empire” architecture bastarded with Italianate.  An Empire on Liberty Street with a Mayor who is a King.  Why must our poorest citizens struggling to buy hamburger, not Beef Wellington, pay to “save” French architecture when Paris has preserved 6,000-year-old architecture and in this style houses as old as France itself.

Fifth, the log cabin courthouse, 1827.  Save it—because in Independence, “equal justice” meant the slave built the courthouse.  It is the only building here that deserves government funding as it is a government building, which should be turned over to the county to take care of. The cost of the cabin when it was built was $150.  How do you need $750,000 to fix a $150 log cabin?  New logs?  That is 5,000 times as much as it cost to build it—who is stealing the money, but the same people who employed the slave?

Independence citizens deserve equal justice, equal rights, equal protection, and equal taxation.  You are going to tax the servants another $400 per household after you told the Russian billionaires, oligopolists, and oligarchs they only had to pay ten percent as much property tax as their servants?


You are the party that can raise taxes for every good thing, but we want to know what you did with the taxes we already gave to you.  They were squandered.  So you keep adding another tax for potholes, parks, puppies, and playgrounds, and now for buildings that you were already supposed to fix with money you already took.  The taxpayers cannot be fooled into thinking that loving history requires loving tyranny and taxes and trickery.

Boring speech, boring subject, and not worth $400 each.