To the editor:

This is for all of you who responded to the letter, “Taxing Dog House Not Right published in the Frontiersman on Mat 16.

Kudos to all of you who made positive and supportive comments. To the few others, you do not quite understand, so I think I’ll explain: We do not live in a dirty shack surrounded with junk and trash while trying to avoid paying taxes. Our little home is modest but quite pretty in winter and even more so in summer when all the perennial seeds I threw around come into bloom. A few annuals come back every year, strangely enough, and since we don’t know what to name them, we dubbed them “taxima maximalia.”

Building a home can be expensive, so we used a lot of recycled or discarded materials to complement the new lumber used for the basic shell. A man’s garbage is another’s treasure, right?

Our home looks almost finished on the outside, thus the excessive appraisal by the borough. Our appeal was rejected because of the infamous “generator shed” and alleged finishing wiring.

Indoors, our home is barely 60 percent finished: No wiring to speak of, no indoor plumbing, etc. This is why we are contesting the borough appraisal of 85 percent complete.

We pay our taxes in full and on time, but do not appreciate price gouging. Get it?

There is a new twist to this little story. Our file — with photos taken by the appraiser — was reviewed by a higher-up in the borough, a lady with brains, who realized what she was looking at was indeed not a generator housed in generator shed, but a large lean-to that shelters are chicken feed and a large chest freezer. Our power source is a 2KW portable generator that we haul inside the house every evening.

That’s why we maintain that our appraisal was both excessive and improper. We feel the borough make a big blunder and it’s up to the borough to correct it because their assessment is, for the most part, a work of fiction.

Faye and Paul Miller

Willow