City Finances

In this post on ElPasoSpeak, Brutus reveals the City’s dirty little secret: our bonds have balloon payments coming due in the 2030’s.

Looking further into the issue the “Amended Continuing Disclosure Report For The Fiscal Year Ended August 31, 2014″ showed us that:

The bonds that were issued in 2007 are being paid down at the rate of 3.2 million dollars a year in 2015 increasing to a rate of 5.7 million dollars a year in 2027. It unfortunately was not going to stop there. The final payment listed was going to be in 2032 for $32,795,000.

What they are doing is that they are selling bonds with slow payments in the early years and huge payments at maturity.

It must not be fun to be an elected official if you don’t have someone else’s money to spend. So let’s just borrow a lot and let some future generation pay it off, after we’ve received our Conquistador awards and the accolades of our contractor friends and maybe a fat job in the private sector.

The bonds above come to over $250 million that will be due in the 2030’s.

Remember that city council had to impose a franchise fee on our water utility just to cover a $3 million budget shortfall this year.

They simply will not have the money to pay off these bonds. What will they do? If we have city representatives that think the same way our current ones do they will re-re-re-re-finance the bonds.

It’s not all doom and gloom. Maybe inflation will erode the purchasing power of the dollar, and it will take $250 million to buy a loaf of bread in 2030, like Zimbabwe. Maybe we’ll run out of water way before that. Maybe the rapture will take us.

Look on the bright side. If you’re living on your retirement funds now, you’ll probably be dead by the time the bill comes due.

Maybe you thought you could leave your house to your kids, as a legacy. Lottery tickets might be a better choice. The lottery’s not a lot different than what our current City Council is undertaking, by borrowing more to build more projects to “attract industry” and “raise property values.” We’re going all in, looking to fill an inside straight on the river.

We could probably avoid all this drama in the future if the City hired someone to look after our finances. Some kind of a chief financial officer, sort of. That person could report to someone we hire to manage the city government. That might keep us out of this sort of a pickle.

Nah, that’s just crazy talk.

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