Jefferson County, Ala., has avoided “what could have been theDoes this sound familiar?
biggest municipal bankruptcy filing in American history,” said Mary Williams Walsh in The New York Times. Officials in the county, which includes Birmingham, have reached a deal to restructure $ 3 billion in debt, which grew out of a sewer system revamp plagued by flawed accounting and corruption. Under the proposal, the county’s Wall Street creditors would forgive about $ 1 billion of the debt, but residents would face higher bills for sewer service.
Tuesday, September 27, 2011
Alabama county cuts deal of debt
We spotted an article in the September 30, 2011 issue of “The Week,” a national magazine, which reminds us of Ogden Valley's own Mountain Valley sewer fiasco.
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2 comments:
The idea that our Weber County Commissioners would fail to provide the required oversight is difficult to fathom. They are the only protection that citizens have against the abuses of a single provider utility. As the body politic, they have the authority to audit the financial records of a utility, but chose not to do so even when asked to by the users last January.
It is bad enough when a utility owner runs a company into the ground physically and financially, but when the oversight body of elected officials and their staff fail to pay attention to obvious signs and complaints, it is time to elect new Commissioners as soon as possible.
While the article mentioned in the magazine about a county in Alabama involved much more money than the fiasco in Ogden Valley, the point is the same. When the government entity charged with oversight is asleep at the switch, the customers pay the price.
We have to be thinking about electing leaders that are involved with more than promoting developers and growth. They are obligated to insure these people that run utilities are running them correctly and at a reasonable price. That is the only reason oversight regulation in government exits.
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