Cda Web Page Catches Some Flak Internet Site Includes Ad For Book On Dodging Property Taxes

The conspiracy theory came before the hotel listings, above the travel company entries and ahead of the real estate office telephone numbers.

A popular Internet site advertising hundreds of North Idaho businesses includes a link to a computer page that markets a conspiracy book about avoiding property taxes.

The link - listed as “Al(l)odial Title” - refers to a form of land patent championed by Populist Party presidential candidate Bo Gritz and a handful of militia organizers.

Until Thursday, it was the first listing computer users around the globe saw when surfing “Coeur d’Alene On-Line - your WWW (World Wide Web) information source about Coeur d’Alene and North Idaho.”

More than 9,300 computer users have viewed the independently created page since September - enough to make Jobs Plus business recruiter Bob Potter recoil.

In a community battling an image as an anti-government hot seat, “it’s really sad” that was the first glimpse outsiders had of Coeur d’Alene, he said.

“It’s just more piling on for a reputation we have but don’t deserve.”

This week, following questions by a reporter, the man who developed the home page moved the “Alodial” link to a less conspicuous position - under a computer heading marked “miscellaneous.”

Rose Lake computer operator Bracken Cherry said he did it only as part of a routine shuffling of listings.

Cherry developed Coeur d’Alene On-Line as a way to market the Lake City to the rest of the world.

Area business owners pay him to have their company or service listed with a telephone number.

The “Alodial” link simply was an advertisement bought by a customer, he said.

“I could care less about the patriot movement,” Bracken said. “If the Militia of Montana said ‘create us a home page,’ I’d have said ‘thanks, but no thanks.”’

The $100 book - payable in “federal reserve notes” or gold coin - seemed harmless and non-controversial.

In fact, Bracken bought a copy himself. “It just seemed like a good deal,” he said.

Under the boxed red heading “Top Secret,” the tax book’s computer page declares the federal government is so afraid of allodial title that “definitions of it have been taken out of our dictionaries.”

The book’s author, St. Maries militia organizer Joseph Stephens, said the term refers to a type of patent that frees landowners from the obligation of paying taxes.

In the September 1994 issue of his “Center for Action” newsletter, former Green Beret Gritz made the same claim.

Idaho Deputy Attorney General Carl Olsson disagreed. Allodial title refers to the way 11th Century English serfs patented land when severing ties to the king, he said.

“It’s a feudal doctrine that hasn’t had application in our law in centuries - if it ever did,” Olsson said.

Those who try it now and quit paying taxes will lose their land, he said.

Cherry doesn’t mind the hubbub.

His computer pages are “selling like hotcakes” and subscribers have no complaints about the link.

“Heck, it’s not like it’s pornography or something,” said Keva Rothe, owner of Aladdin Travel in Post Falls.

For $750 a year, Rothe said, Cherry’s system is the best advertising move she’s ever made.

“I’ve had a couple thousand hits (inquiries) off it in three months,” she said.

, DataTimes MEMO: IDAHO HEADLINE: CdA On-Line links Web surfers to tax protesters