Sad, Isn't it?

[shipperx]

Signed onto AOL and saw the headline "Southern County Near Bankruptcy" And I didn't even pause. I thought: "Bet that's us..."

And, yes, it is. (well, not specifically. I live and now work across the county line, but it's all the same city metro area, so... yeah... still 'us.') Not surprised. We have a crazy ass, insanely corrupt Water Board (no, not that kind) that's appointed instead of elected and thus cannot be voted out of office (I know!) that went bug fuck crazy years ago with an insanely expensive (and in many respects just flat-out insane) sewer system (that wasn't and cannot be finished without endangering the Cahaba River and thus further contaminate our primary source of drinking water which, in theory, was the reason for the improved sewer system. It's a vicious cycle (especially so since significant chunks of the Red Mountain area are still on septic systems). More local discussion of it here. ) with tons of no-bid contracts to 'friends.' There's a reason why Black and White has a regular column entitled: Dead City Diary: The Insane and Inevitable Decline of a City (And no need to be partisan about it. The council has both parties... all of them equally nuts. (No, seriously, reading how it's covered in B&W, some of these people are NUTS!) Of course, since the city has declined so much, most people don't actually live in it , just work there... where we pay unlawful employment tax, that -- though it's been ruled unlawful multiple times by state and federal courts they never repeal. This is why we're quickly becoming a twin city. Birmingham/Jefferson County has been in decline for decades while Hoover/Shelby County is bursting at the seams.) Hey, I never claimed that it made sense.

Comments

[jerrymcl89.livejournal.com]

Bad government sucks. And it's a lot harder to hide, and comes to the surface faster, at the state/municipal level. The federal governement has a lot of options for hiding it's massive screw-ups. Most lower level governments actually do need to balance their budgets, so accountability arrives sooner.

[shapinglight]

That's appalling. I can't imagine anything like that happening over here now - back in the 70s yes, but not now.

[shipperx.livejournal.com]

What needs to be done is for the surrounding cities to pull out of the Birmingham Water Works. Birmingham may be the known city but it's only a fraction of the city metro area. The surrounding town/cities such as Homewood, Mountain Brook, Vestavia, Hoover, Leeds, Chelsea, etc. depend on the Birmingham Water Works (don't pity B'ham, we pay water & sewer prices that border on extortion) and none of us in the other cities can vote on Water Board issues because we aren't technically Birmingham. Meanwhile the Water Board has been the source of a great deal of scandal, mismanaged funds, embezzling, and politicians paying off "friends".

Last year when the drought was extreme, all of these towns/cities had severe water restrictions... except Pelham... because they don't use the Birmingham Water Works. Hoover has a population nearly as large as B'ham and, if combined with Vestavia, we'd have a substantially larger population and could build our own water/sewer system, freeing us of the Birmingham Water Works, but there are convoluted contractural reasons why that doesn't happen (one of which has to do with Lake Purdy -- another of the primary water sources -- being located in Hoover/Vestavia and Shelby County, instead of Birmingham and Jefferson county. The Water Works Board is not going to relinquish Lake Purdy to Hoover and/or Shelby hence B'ham insisting that the two systems remain tied.

The sad truth is, Birmingham's problems aren't easily solved because of the fact that it's a metro area of isolated townships that in the last 100 years have grown into one another forming one large population center that, on the surface, is known as "Birmingham" but is in fact a bunch of towns/cities flowing into one another. Each of these cities maintain their own governments, and invididual cities such as Mountain Brook, Homewood, Vestavia, Hoover, and Chelsea are all solvent (actually, arguably, all of them are reasonably to -- in the case of Mnt. Brook obscenely-- well off. Three of those six cities aren't even in Jefferson County but in Shelby County, which is far from bankrupt. So on the one hand everyone knows that the Water Works Board is killing Birmingham but legally we're separate cities and a separate county so there isn't much we can do. And, sadly for Birmingham itself, other than the water issues, there's not a great deal of direct incentive for Hoover, Vestavia, Mountain Brook, Homewood, etc to do anything since, if anything, they profit from businesses and people moving outside the city limits. (Which is tragic for the lower income population on North Side).

Frankly, if it were to declare bankruptcy -- or at least if the Water Works Board was allowed to declare bankruptcy, it would be helpful. The Water Works Board might then be forcibly replaced (it's been threatened multiple times, but if anyone new ever had access to the records, there would no doubt be indictments coming down the pike. The Water Board doesn't want that happening, so though they continue to drown in debt, they won't declare bankruptcy. Notice the AOL article states that County Commission voted against declaring bankruptcy).

If they don't declare bankruptcy, I bet they'll just go back to the law suits over the employment tax which -- because it's been ruled as being unconstitutional multiple times even as they've refused to repeal the tax -- they've been forced to keep the money, untouched, in a separate escrow account until they can get a court verdict that they like the issue is resolved. By this point, with it being over a decade, that account must be staggeringly huge. So, if they don't declare bankruptcy, there's a good chance they'll go back to the old "sue somebody" route trying to access the educational bond money or the employment tax money.

It's a circus that's been going for over a decade. However, I knew when they floated the stupid idea that somehow B'ham could access the federal bailout money, that it would hit the national press... and it has. Locally, however, this is neither a new nor surprising.

[shapinglight]

Goes to show, I suppose, that politics at a local level is still just as dirty.

[shipperx.livejournal.com]

Definitely.

[shipperx.livejournal.com]

There's just such cronyism involved in B'Ham politics (and so few people actually allowed to vote in B'Ham proper) that it's virtually impossible to cause real change.