Preston Smith Marks Jackson County Progress Against Odds

His work isn't yet complete  . . . And sooner or later, voters will have an opportunity to empower him as an elected assessor. 

We've revealed www.TonysKansasCity.com bias continually . . . 

Preston Smith deserves credit for sharing public info and working tirelessly to move the tax fighter agenda forward in Jackson County and push back in the property tax assessment battle.

And right now . . . 

We wanted to share this note that has garnered a bit of social media attention but might have escaped many local feeds.

Here's the word . . .  

PRESTON SMITH: HISTORY WAS MADE, YOU WERE THERE. YOU MADE IT HAPPEN. 

I decided to ask CHAT GPT what are the odds of what we have seen happen the last six weeks here in Jackson County. This is going to blow your mind. Here's what it said:

• First, the chance that any county would go through a six-year train wreck like we did—21,000 appeals one year, 54,000 two years later, and now tens of thousands of businesses over-valued overcharged—under the same leadership that refused to fix it. We rated that at about 1 in 50,000 for any given county.

• Second, the chance that, even with that meltdown, a volunteer group with virtually no paid staff could gather 42,000 valid signatures to force a recall onto the ballot. We put that at about 1 in 1,000.

• Third, the chance that a former Royals star and two-term County Executive, who had won re-election by 11 points, would then be recalled by 85% of the voters. Among places that even get to a recall vote, we estimated that at about 1 in 100.

• Fourth, the chance that, in the same wave, voters would approve making the Assessor elected, and do it with an 88% landslide to set a state record for that margin. Again, we estimated that at about 1 in 100, even after you factor in all the anger.

When you multiply those four conservative odds together—1/50,000, 1/1,000, 1/100, and 1/100—you get roughly ONE IN 500 BILLION.

You can argue with the exact estimates, but I actually tilted them in favor of making these events more likely, not less. And even then, you’re still talking about odds on the order of hundreds of billions to one that one county in America would see all of this in one six-year stretch.

In plain English: what happened here in Jackson County just doesn’t happen. It was a once-in-a-lifetime course correction, driven by you—the people—not the politicians. Virtually no living political scientist, historian or pollster will have a real-world basis for comparison: This is a historical outlier for any major American urban area. 
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