Tags: 
— News about Quincy from Quincy Quarry News with commentary added.
“Climb every mountain …”
Image via the Mercury News
Quincy Quarry Weekly Fish Wrap: Shoveling bovine byproduct – lots of it.
As previewed in Quincy Quarry News last week, Quincy Mayor Tom Koch rolled out his latest expensive, as well as grandiose schemes to be variously funded by already long-suffering taxpayers via his COVID-19 delayed State of the City address on Tuesday.
Key among the reasons for the delay in this mostly annual speech was that Mayor Koch was secretly out sick with COVID in early January when the State of the City is usually foisted.
That and when Quincy was solidly in COVID-19 Code Red status.
Friends, Romans, Kochsters …
Image via Facebook
In any event, Mayor Koch opened with an up speech style to congratulate all of those mostly outside of City Hall, including mostly those who also do not work for the City of Quincy, who have saved his tukas over the past year.
Mayor Koch then moved on to talking up many among his entourage of hack hires for whatever it is that they do other than holding coats and rearranging deck chairs on the S.S. Koch as it sinks in a sea of red ink.
He next segued onto pimping of more massive bond issues, one to sate his jonesing edifice complex as well as cover his backside and the other to just try to save his tukas.
Coming soon to the Q
A Millenium Partners CAD/CAM image
The first solicitation was to pander for support to spend something surely north of $100 million, if not well north of $100 million, to build a fifteen-story building adjacent to Quincy Center.
The building would the tallest building ever built in Quincy.
In turn, the building would provide a new venue for Quincy’s City Hall but would mostly be used as a home for Quincy College.
That and surely but coincidentally provide Mayor Koch with a penthouse office view of Houghs Neck and beyond.
Special interests
a ThePeoplesVoice.org image
The scheme would also do a solid for a longtime Koch benefactor by buying the property needed for this latest Kochian pie in the sky scheme at a sweet takings price premium.
So what if the property comes with a rundown old two-story building that should have been condemned years ago for all manner of serious to potentially fatal building code violations.
And as for Quincy College, a school Mayor Koch briefly attended but without completing an associate’s degree long ago when the college was more accurately know as Quincy Junior College, the plan looks to be to grift the school with a sweet decades-long and fixed-rate rental agreement.
How sweet?
Nova Residence of Quincy while under assembly
A Quincy Quarry News file photo
The rent will likely be based on the annual bond debt service expense to build the portion of the building to be used by the college.
Unclear but probably, the rental rate will not include fully covering only to be expected “unexpected” future costs as well as maybe not even fully cover maintenance and other typical expenses that would be incurred by the college’s tenancy.
After all, such was the case with two relatively recent long-term and bargain rate leases for the decades-long use of hundreds of new city-owned garage parking spaces in Quincy Center that were given to surely but coincidentally generous contributors to Mayor Koch’s campaign fund.
In any event, the touted rationale for the expected sweet deal: provide the college with a stable home at an affordable price.
So what, however, for the fact that very much care of Mayor Koch’s decisions over the years involving the college overall as well as his hack hires at it, the college now desperately needs a break on its rental expenses.
Look out below!
A barrons.com image
How desperate? The college’s residual net asset worth has dropped from just into eight-figure positive net assets value when Koch first came into office an unlucky thirteen years ago to a projected at least $20 million in the red today as well as still all but assuredly still bleeding red.
Red ink that local taxpayers have been having to subsidize.
Granted, Quincy College is surely seeing federal COVID-19 bailout funding; at the same time, tax dollar funded money is still care of taxpayers’ money no matter which branch of the government is cutting the check.
What happens with your federal tax payments!
A file photo
Even worse, if the college eventually folds as many fourth and especially peer fifth tier colleges have done in recent years as well are expected to continue to close, local taxpayers will be stuck with covering the whole nut for a mostly empty building as well as in the wake of large commercial space tenants pretty much fleeing Quincy Center for, well, decades.
Even so, one has to give Mayor Koch props for talking up how Quincy College offers a great educational benefit for locals.
So what, however, that many to perhaps most of its students are not locals but local taxpayers’ pockets have been picked to prop up the foundering well-before COVID hit the fan.
That and as the college’s tuition rates have soared in recent years.
What happens with local tax payments
A CheatSheet.com image
And then Mayor Koch shifted to justifying his pending $400 million bond debt ask to fund the City of Quincy’s currently woefully underfunded employee pension plan.
His key selling point: how doing so would reduce the amount that local taxpayers have to lay out annually so as to endeavor to fund a close to $400 million employee pension benefits funding shortfall.
Not mentioned, however, is how his scheme would entail a substantial interest cost added to the current no interest cost sixteen payment schedule to a proforma thirty-year projection requiring interest payments.
In other words, think variation on refinancing a mortgage with fifteen years to go with a new thirty-year mortgage, only worse.
So what, apparently, for the fact that Quincy’s credit rating got a black eye recently.
Also unmentioned was any acknowledgment of the fact that the current funding deadline of 2037 is the result of Mayor Koch taking advantage of special legislation passed in the wake of the Crash of 2008 to previously extend the City of Quincy’s then deadline to make the fund whole by roughly a decade or thereabouts.
No mas
A file photo
In other words, Mayor Koch’s proposal is a second kicking of the can down the road.
Way down the road.
Also not duly acknowledged is how Koch’s peeps on the pension board did a less than aces job on investment strategies with the funds.
Nothing illegal, mind you. Even so, while many to most other Massachusetts municipal pension funds have recovered from the crash and some even then some during the still ongoing decade-long bull stock market, Quincy’s woefully underfunded pension level has instead declined over the past decade even as the stock market has soared to record levels.
Another close shave?
Image via Facebook
Further, there was no mention of the only clear cui bono for the plan: taking out the $400 million in bond debt to endeavor to fully fund pension benefits.
Specifically, doing so could perhaps preclude imposing any haircuts on pension benefits paid out in the event of Quincy ending up filing Chapter 9 should koched-up spending and massive amounts of debt incurred during the Koch Maladmistration end up putting the City of Quincy into default.
And as for a further kick in the teeth for local taxpayers, if Team Koch’s investment fund team continues to be less than aces, local taxpayers would continue to be on the hook for any future pension funding shortfalls.
Such a deal!
A bumper sticker graphic
But not worry for Tommy!
Rioting locals
An old Universal Pictures image
After all, things don’t look really start hitting the fan hard until around 2028 or so and by which time one can only assume that he is retired, been voted out of office or other is unavailable.
On the other hand, there is a likely consequential enough income tax problem for city pensioners arising from Mayor Koch’s proposal to bail out the city’s pension fund via the use of tax-free municipal bonds to do so.
Fortunately, there are karmic brights sides to this latest bite on tukas that is typical to Kochinan schemes: not only could Mayor Koch be looking at a larger tax bite on his own expected pension benefits after decades of dining at the public throve, in the near-term he could well be looking at potentially significant protests by city employees once they find out that they could also so end up swived.
And there’s a new twist to the game:
Quincy to get $46.3 million from federal stimulus
The follow-up story should be entitled: Let the fun begin.
Dom,
It is definitely going to be interesting.
Then again, our peerless mayor doesn’t have exactly have carte blanche with the 46 large — or at least shouldn’t. Local tax revenues such as c/o excise and meals taxes are looking to be down by around $10 million in hard dollars this fiscal year along with a lot of property taxes looking to be in arrears. Additionally, Koch tapped city reserves hard by over 6 large — if not well over — to help fund this year’s budget but which he promised would be replenished — when however was not specified. Further, he let current city union employee contracts expire as well as failed to set aside any reserves to cover sure to be expected eventual pay increases.
Throw in already surely spending millions under the assumption that the feds would bail him out, don’t be surprised if the $46m in fed emergency funding is pretty much already burned and we thus be Q’ed come next year’s budget as well as followed by the necessary property taxes which primarily fund it.
Oh, and this is BEFORE any consideration of Mayor Koch floating plans to issue over half a billion in bond debt to attempt to save his tukas given his peeps’ woeful mismanagement of the City’s employee pension fund along with his various failed plans and problems caused by hack hires imposed upon Quincy College.
Think rolling an ugly credit card balance over to a new card with an initial ticker rate balance transfer offer.