How Jeff Blubaugh went to March Madness and wound up $2,900 richer | Opinion
So, I go to March Madness and end up writing about Jeff Blubaugh.
While the NCAA delivered some of college basketball at its worst on Thursday, Blubaugh, a Sedgwick County commissioner, walked away with more than $2,900 from a pop-up unclaimed property tent that the state treasurer set up in nearby Naftzger Park.
And he’s going to be on ABC News Good Morning America for it.
Thursday’s first two NCAA Tournament games at Wichita’s Intrust Bank Arena were both boring blowouts, with Houston shredding Southern Illinois University Edwardsville to the tune of 78-40, closely followed by Gonzaga mauling Georgia 89-68.
Probably the most interesting thing about those games was that they both featured teams with the same mascots, Cougars in the case of Houston-SIUE and Bulldogs in the Gonzaga-Georgia matchup.
So, I decided to go over to Naftzger and check out the social scene, and ran into Kansas State Treasurer Steven Johnson.
He’d set up a tent where people could have his staff check to see if they were owed any money for unclaimed property.
A lot of that winds up in the treasurer’s office, like uncashed and undeliverable checks, insurance proceeds that never got to the beneficiaries, and forgotten bank accounts and safe-deposit box contents.
Johnson brought his team and their tent to the park so they could appear on a segment of Good Morning America’s recurring feature called “Show Me the Money.”
“It was a chance to work with Good Morning America,” Johnson said. “Just to get the word out nationally (about unclaimed property recovery) and to get Kansas on the map for a moment was a good opportunity for today.”
Then I introduced myself to the GMA reporter, Will Reeve.
“Every state in the country has unclaimed property, unclaimed money,” Reeve said. “Sometimes it’s a few dollars — I myself found I was owed $7 in Virginia. I’ve never lived in Virginia, but for some reason I was owed that money.
“But what’s even more exciting is some people, it turns out they have like thousands of dollars owed them. We’ve had people on camera find $1,800, $2,000, real substantial money.”
Enter Jeff Blubaugh. They ran his name and then did a big reveal for the TV camera, with a giant check in the amount of $2,906 (and 26 cents).
And that wasn’t even his personal best.
Blubaugh owns a lot of properties and has collected big money before on misdirected insurance payments and whatnot. He said the last time they checked it a couple years ago, he got more than $10,000.
Before I left, I asked the treasurer’s staff to run my name.
As they went through the Leflers, the only name I knew that cropped up was my son Braden, who lives in Overland Park and is a business litigation attorney with a big-name law firm in Kansas City, Mo.
Turns out he’s owed money for an unclaimed refund on a college fee, apparently from his undergrad days at Wichita State University, that my wife and I probably wrote the check for in the first place.
I got nothing.
This is not a just world.
