Quincy Quarry Weekly Fish Wrap: Burn Baby Burn!

Up in smoke!
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– News and commentary about Quincy from Quincy Quarry News.

Quincy Quarry Weekly Fish Wrap: Burn Baby Burn!

First local property owners were whacked in the mail shortly after the start of the New Year with property tax bill increases that averaged almost three times the rate of inflation.

Enough already
A meme

And then it got worse. 

Much worse.

Without going all wonky on those already hammered, Quincy’s peerless mayor has both koched-up Fiscal Year 2020 spending to record levels as well as continues to make worse the all but out of control structural deficit status of City of Quincy annual budgets going forward.

The financial problems so facing local taxpayers who will have to cover the nut are thus both numerous as well as considerable.

Working hard, hardly working?
An Easy Money Associates/Orion Pictures Image

For but one example, current city employee union contracts expire this year and their impending new contracts will likely provide relatively generous pay raises given a healthy economy. 

That and perhaps to probably endeavor to concurrently provide cover for the only to be expected fat pay raises for exempt senior Koch Maladministration officials and selected wannabe coat holders come Fiscal Year 2021.

And as for further financial pain for local taxpayers, consider the City of Quincy’s woefully underfunded as in among the worst off municipal employee pension funds in the whole of the Commonwealth as well as is even worth off than the T’s pension fund. 

Way worse.  Wicked way worse.

In turn, this shortfall is all but certain to only become even more painful for local taxpayers in coming years as they are whacked even harder to subsidize a currently over $400 million pension obligation shortfall.

Tax money apparently grow on tree
A Daniel Vartinian Aoociate image

Even so, the Mayor Koch is planning to continue to run up the city’s outstanding debt service to ever increasingly new record levels to primarily fund his building things in Quincy Center in the hope that more development may actually come to the center. 

So what if the math suggests that his plans for redeveloping Quincy Center will likely end up costing local taxpayers on most of their annual tax bills until at least the 2060 to help subsidize his grandiose expectations, he still plans to double down on his so far arguably losing bets.

Business as usual
A Quincy Quarry meme

To whit, after Mayor Koch’s swearing in this past Monday for yet another term in office to profligately spend taxpayers’ money, he rolled out plans to do even more of the same.

His latest plan: spend surely north of $100 million – if not well north of a hundred large – to first yet again buy a variously problematic Quincy Center property from yet another connected local property owner at a likely über premium price and then build a fifteen story municipally-owned building on the property to house mostly the foundering and money-losing city-owned Quincy College and the rest of it for new city hall office space.

No mention, however, about where and how needed parking might be provided.

Custom-woven imported woolen carpet
A Kara Delahunt/Patriot Ledger image

Granted, while it is wicked easy to discern that a Napoleonic Edifice Complex is fueling Koch’s plans to have the tallest office suite in Quincy, Quincy Quarry would suggest that fifteen floors may not provide sufficient distance to protect him from the hordes of angry taxpayers stuck with the bill for a likely to be even more over the top custom imported carpeting-appointed imperial office suite

Heads on pikes
An old piece of French art

But what the hay, as well as yet again, it’s only taxpayers’ money. 

Nine figures worth of taxpayers’ hard-earned money.

In short, even more of the same old same old Only in the Q© during the Koch Maladministration’s reign of financial terror.

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