Sulphur Springs News-Telegram (Sulphur Springs, Tex.), Vol. 101, No. 73, Ed. 1 Tuesday, March 27, 1979 Page: 1 of 10
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MICROFILM SERVICE & SALES CO.
P. 0. EOX 45436
DALLAS, TX 75235
* COMP
Sulphur Springs
Tuesday
MARCH 27, 1979.
15 Cents
2\Viu£j-u>h'0ram
VOL. 101.—NO,73.
BAGHDAD, Iraq (AP) — Egyptian
President Anwar Sadat’s Arab foes met
here today to try to agree on action to
sabotage his peace treaty with Israel. The
big question was how far Saudi Arabia,
Egypt’s chief financial backer, would
agree to go.
Iraq’s ruling Baathist Party organized a
big rally to kick off the Arab League
session. Official Iraqi newspapers called
for “concrete measures against Sadat on
political, economic, informational and
mass mobilization levels.”
The meeting of Arab , foreign and
economic ministers was called to discuss
Gas cost boost seen
as OPEC hikes price
GENEVA, Switzerland (AP» - The
Organization of Petroleum Exporting
Countries voted today to raise the base
price of crude oil by 9 percent as of next
Sunday, to $14.54 a barrel. That would
increase American pump prices fcr
gasoline by about two cents a gallon.
Libya and Venezuela immediately
announced surcharges on the new price.
The new base price apparently was a
victory for the so-called Arab moderates
such as Saudi Arabia and Abu Dhabi over
more militant members such as Algeria,
Iran, Libya and Iraq.
The militants apparently settled for the
smaller increase in the base price in ex-
change for the surcharges, analysts said.
The new base price is the price the oil
cartel originally had set for next October
in its quarterly increase schedule.
An OPEC announcement said the oil
ministers authorized unlimited sur-
charges over the base price, depending on
market demand. Earlier, Qatar oil
minister Abdul Aziz Khalifa alTham in-
correctly said a $4-per barrel limit had
been put on surcharges.
Today’s base price increase is roughly
equal to surcharges announced earlier by
many OPEC members and supersedes
those surcharges. However Libya an-
nounced it would raise prices 11.66 a
barrel over the new base price. Venezuela
anounced a $1.20 increase.
Iran, which had lobbied for a whopping
29 percent increase in the base price, said
it had no current plans for a surcharge.
Bomb rips
JERUSALEM (AP) — One woman was
killed and 20 other persons were injured
today when a bomb exploded under a
vegetable stand in an outdoor market in
Lod, 15 miles east of Tel Aviv, police said.
Two of the injured were reported in
serious condition.
A Palestine Liberation Organization
spokesman in Beirut said a PLO unit from
the West Bank of the Jordan River was
responsible and said: “The blast is part of
a plan to escalate anti-Israel warfare in
protest against the treaty of treason.”
He said guerrillas throughout Lebanon
OPEC says semtarges are its response
to what it cads profiteering by oil com-
panies wise Sate advantage of the current
shortage by charging high prices on the
short-term. or "spot" market. Prices
there haws- reacted $20 a barrel recently.
The price mthki were voted one day
after Egypt and Israel signed a peace
treaty but ttere was no immediate
indication that tte signing, which in-
furiated most Arab nations, was related to
the increase,
The cscrtmt price tor Arabian light
crude oii the so-called benchmark of the
industry is $113$ for a 42-gallon barrel. A
5 percent increase m OPEC prices usually
increases the Americas price of gasoline
about a penny a gallon.
Analysts here estimated the new base
price wiE add about $13.5 billion to OPEC
coffers thus year from industrialized
Western na£wm
Meanwhile, a number of the members
took advantage fi the oil shortage caused
by the sutpeonm of Iran’s exports and
raised prices by putting on surcharges,
generally in the neighborhood of 9 percent.
The Geneva meeting was called to try to
formulate stated price and production
policies.
Iran, with mere than two months of
export revenue lost because of its
revolution agaaosl Shah Mohammad Reza
Pahlavi and plans to reduce the pre-
revolution export level in the future, urged
an immediate 29 percent increase when
the meeting opened Monday. This would
market
went on maximum alert against Israeli
retaliation.
It was the second explosion set off by
Palestinians angered by the Egyptian-
Israe'u peace treaty signed Monday in
Washington A band grenade wounded
nine persons two of them American
tourists, m a hostel in Arab East
Jerusalem Monday night.
Despite the threat of Arab terrorism,
Israelis sang, wept and danced the hora
Monday after watching the signing of their
peace treaty with Egypt.
have raised .(he basic price of Arabian
sight crude to $17.45 a barrel.
Cyrus Ebrahimzadeh, an economic
adviser to the Iranian delegation, claimed
the proposal was favored by most of the
ministers. But other sources reported stiff
opposition from Saudi Arabia and Abu
Dhabi, who they said want a smaller in-
crease.
OPEC in December agreed on a four-
stage schedule of increases totaling 14.5
percent by Oct. 1. The second increase, to
$13.84 a barrel, is scheduled for April 1,
and the October base price is scheduled to
be $14.55.
Meanwhile, a number of the members
took advantage of the oil shortage caused
by the suspension of Iran’s exports and
raised prices by putting on surcharges,
generally in the neighborhood of 9 percent.
Analysts said a 29 percent increase in
the price of OPEC oil would raise U.S.
gasoline and heating oil prices 6 cents a
gallon. But the precise impact of a price
rise on inflation rates is difficult to pin-
point because “the times when OPEC
raises prices in general are times when
the world economy is booming and in-
flation rates are rising,” according to
I>eon Taub, an analyst for the New York
consulting firm of Chase Econometric
Associates Inc. ' /
John Mugno, an analyst for Citibank,
estimated a one-shot, 25-percent OPEC
increase might raise the U.S. inflation rate
this year by one-half of a percentage point.
One place where OPEC actions have
been easily observed is at the American
gasoline pump. OPEC’s 5 percent increase
in January was expected to add about 3
cents a gallon to retail gasoline prices,
while the surcharges were figured to mean
another 1-cent boost.
But prices have jumped by more than a
dime a gallon in the past year, partly due
to a sharp increase in demand for hard-to-
refine unleaded gasoline and partly to a
change in federal price rules allowing
refiners to pass on increased processing
costs to consumers.
The average retail price of a gallon of
regular leaded gasoline at a full-service
filling station jumped 3.68 cents this month
to 73.25 cents.
Lonely walk
Silhouetted by late evening sunlight pouring through the south
hall doors at Sulphur Springs Middle School, a custodian puts
the' facility back into shape for the next day's classes. The work
may be hard and sometimes lonely, but educators insist the
school system can't work without the efforts of custodians
throughout the school system. Local school custodians and
maintenance personnel will be honored at a 10 a m. Wednesday
coffee in the board room of the Administration Building on Con
nally Street.
• -Stall Photo by JOHN GORE
Arabs plan treaty sabotage
application of resolutions adopted at an
anti-Sadat summit conference in Baghdad
last November. They call for:
—A boycott of any Egyptian party or
person that deals with Israel.
—Suspension of Egypt’s membership in
the 22-member Arab League and transfer
of the league’s headquarters from Cairo to
another Arab capital.
—Creation of an annual $3 billion fund to
help the Palestine Liberation Organization
and the “confrontation states” around
Israel — Jordan, Syria and Iraq — to build
up their military forces to fight the
“treacherous peace.”
The key issue was whether Saudi Arabia
would reduce or cut off financial aid to
Egypt of nearly $2 billion a year. Egyptian
officials think it won’t, because a cutoff
would cause economic hardship in Egypt
that could cause Sadat’s overthrow, and
the conservative Saudi royal family does
not want to see the Arab world’s most
populous and militarily powerful nation
taken over by radicals.
Meanwhile, the anti-Sadat half of the
Arab world reacted to the signing of the
Egyptian-Israeli peace treaty in
Washington with strikes, demonstrations,
a lot of angry rhetoric and some violence.
Local authorities back
sales tax for counties
“We need some money from
somewhere,” says Hopkins County Judge
Joe R. Pogue when asked about legislation
presently pending in the Texas
Legislature that would provide for a one
percent sales tax for the counties.
The Legislature keeps piling new
responsibilities on counties but hasn’t
given them a new revenue source to pay
the bills, a McLennan County com-
missioner says.
Commissioner Roy Nail recently urged
the House Ways and Means Committee to
approve a bill that would let the counties
impose the one percent sales tax if local
voters approved.
He said his county was having to build a
$6 million jail because of standards set by
the legislatively created Texas Com-
mission on Jail Standards. Judge Pogue
says that Hopkins County is also having
problems meeting the standards and the
Commissioners Court only recently ap-
proved the expenditure of county funds to
bring the jail in to conformation with
“most” of the requirements.
Nail says that the 1977 Speedy Trial Act
is adding $125,000 a year to the cost of
operating the county’s courts and
prosecutors’ offices. “We know what the
sales tax has done for the state and the
cities, and we think it could do the same
thing for counties,” Nail said.
Judge Pogue said (hat at present the
Speedy Trial Act isn’t having that much
affect on the county. “In the future though,
it’ll add some costs here,” he said, “in
fact, we’ll probably need a county court-
at-law before too long.”
“If the bill is passed, it would help keep
ad valorem taxes down,” Pogue said. The
sales tax would include all of the residents
whereas the ad valorem tax only affects
the property or land owners.”
The committee last week sent two
county sales tax bills to subcommittees for
more study. One by Rep. Lee Jackson, R-
Dallas, would give three-fourths of the
revenue to school districts within a county.
The rest would go to county government.
The other, by Rep. Bill Keese, D-
Somerville, would entitle a county to all
the money from its sales tax. To receive
its allocation under Jackson’s bill, a school
district would have to reduce property
taxes by 90 percent of what it received
from the sales tax.
City Manager Lee Vickers agrees with
Judge Pogue. “I think the county needs
some help,” he says, “I don’t know of a
single county in this state that’s over
financed.”
“I suspect that people would rather have
a penny sales tax than see what has been
happening in property taxes,” Jackson
said. He explained that if voters in each
county approved a county sales tax, it
would mean $317 million a year for schools
and $105.9 million for counties.
Children gain
from benefit
bike-a-thon
St. Jude Children’s Research
Hospital will be in the beneficiary
Saturday when almost 150 bike riders
take part in the “Wheels for Life”
bike-a-thon at Sulphur Springs High
School.
The event, being coordinated by the
Sulphur Springs Police Department
under the direction of Patrolman
Sammy Weaver, already has entries
from Sulphur Springs High School,
North Hopkins, Sulphur Bluff, and
Miller Grove High Schools with en-
trants expected from Como-Pickton,
Saltillo and possibly Cumby High
Schools, according to Weaver. “We’ll
know tonight whether we’re going to
have one of the sororities from East
Texas State University riding with us
too,” he said.
The parking lot between the High
School and the Civic Center will be the
starting place at 10 a.m. Saturday
when Weaver and co-chairmen Kim
Whitworth and Lea Anne DuPriest get
the bike riders on their way. The two-
mile course travels down Houston
Street to the City Park to League
Street then back through City Park to
the campus again.
“We need more riders,” says
Weaver. To become a participant in
the bike-a-thon, interested persons
may pick up sponsor forms at Sulphur
Springs High School or at the Police
Department. The rider should then
begin getting pledges and bring the
competed forms to register at 10 a.m.
If the potential rider is under 18
years of age, a parent or guardian
must have signed the forms.
Weaver says that refreshments will
be served during the event and that T-
shirts will be given to riders who
collect $25 or more and backpacks for
those collecting $75 or more.
Safety check for Saturday
Co chairmen tor the "Wheels of Life” bike a fhon check out
owe of the entrant's bicycles prior to Saturday's event to raise
money tor the St. Jude Children's Research Hospital. Kim
MflMtwerth (lett), Lea Anne DuPriest, Terri Burney and
Patrolman Sammy Weaver checked the bike and declared it
ready for 10 a m. Saturday when almost 200 riders are ex
peeled to assemble at Sulphur Springs High School. Weaver
says potential entrants can contact him at 885 7602 for more
information on how to enter the event.
-Stall Pholo
County tax-due
notices mailed
Second notices have been mailed to
7.000 property owners in Hopkins
County who have not paid their 1978
taxes.
Jeff Taylor, tax accessor-collector,
said that people receiving the second
notices can avoid additional penalties
and interest by paying their tax ac-
counts now.
Unpaid tax accounts in Hopkins
County are placed op the delinquent
roll after July 1 and then turned over
to attorneys for collection.
Taylor’s office had 32,094 receipts
available for property owners for the
1978 tax year.
Hopkins County’s delinquent tax
roll currently has 5,000 items listed.
Taylor said this compares with the
50.000 listing on the Hunt County
delinquent tax roll, according to a
computer programer familiar with
the situation.
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Keys, Clarke. Sulphur Springs News-Telegram (Sulphur Springs, Tex.), Vol. 101, No. 73, Ed. 1 Tuesday, March 27, 1979, newspaper, March 27, 1979; Sulphur Springs, Texas. (https://texashistory.unt.edu/ark:/67531/metapth824566/m1/1/: accessed April 25, 2024), University of North Texas Libraries, The Portal to Texas History, https://texashistory.unt.edu; crediting Hopkins County Genealogical Society.