Quincy Quarry Weekly Fish Wrap: Mayor Koch continues to keep rolling the dice with taxpayers’ money!

— News about Quincy from Quincy Quarry News with commentary added.

Chilling in casual wear over the long weekend.
An Easy Money Associates/Orion Pictures image

Quincy Quarry Weekly Fish Wrap: Mayor Koch continues to keep rolling the dice with taxpayers’ money!

So what that Standard and Poor’s downgraded the City of Quincy’s bond credit rating recently over financial concerns which Quincy Mayor Thomas P. Koch owns at least a fair share portion of the responsibility, if not also the blame.

In fact, most of the blame per the various reviews by gimlet-eyed as well as gimel-drinking Quincy Quarry personnel on the Quarry’s financial and other affairs desk.

Further, a couple of weeks ago the City Council last week made it to Mayor Koch that it would not fund the $23 million land purchase and thus but a tacit down payment on his likely to run at least $200 million plans to build his latest “Edifice Complex” and which as proposed is a gobsmackingly bombastic hot mess of a design so as to fake the worst sort of faux historicity as well as to also so provide new space for a combined as well as much larger City Hall and a home for the still-foundering Quincy College in a building that is vying to be the tallest building in Quincy.

Not to mention the only reasonable to expect plans for a sixteenth-floor penthouse suite view for Quincy’s vertically-challenged mayor.

Edifice Complexes happen, keep happening – whatever …
An iconic Quincy Quarry file photo

That and also make it look like Mayor Koch’s plans for a “New Quincy Center” are actually going to pan out and so provide long-promised tax relief to long-suffering local taxpayers.

Bon chance, however, for either – much less both – per the reviews of Quincy Quarry’s urban redevelopment expertise.

Even so, Mayor Koch defiantly announced late last week that he now plans to tap $10 million of federal COVID aid provided to the City of Quincy to buy the property needed for his dream tower, along with $5 million more care of another federal COVID aid grant provided to the years-long foundering Quincy College to cover the rest of the purchase price of the site for the sure to be named Koch Tower.

Tenants looking to be kicked to the curb?
Image via ABA Journal

Not covered in Koch’s pending buy, however, is any funding for relocating tenants in the building targeted for purchase and as was previously proposed.

So what also for the fact that Mayor Koch still needs to score another projected $160 million or thereabouts to build his latest pipedream.

That and so what if the college plans to kick in its $5 million share on the buy from its federal COVID relief grant rather than use it to cover the cost of its employee healthcare benefits and as it is supposed to pay for all of its expenses via its tuition revenue given a variety of long outstanding protocols.

But not to worry.  At least not by the college’s Board of Governors and employees, that is.

Koch and mirrors
Image via Margaret Street Church of Christ

Not only does Mayor Koch want to permanently stick local taxpayers with covering the college’s currently $2.4 million annual healthcare bill that the college should be paying out of its own revenue, Koch clearly appears to be planning to further stick local taxpayers with at least a few more millions of the college’s annual expenses in the coming years. 

That and both variously stealth underwrite as well as de facto obligate local taxpayers to cosign on the debt on the projected upwards of $135 million cost to provide Quincy College with a new home.

Leasing the way into an eventual Chapter 9 filing?
An old Facebook photo

Further, Quincy’s well-past merely but free-spending mayor is also concurrently grifting a $475 million pension bond issue ask so as to fund a kicking of the can of the dire shortfall in the City of Quincy pension obligations over the next thirty years so that he can then spend even more as well as concurrently stick taxpayers.

That and so also further cover the college’s supposed to be its own problem roughly $24 million or so pension benefits obligations shortfall.

Burn rate, money to burn – whatever
Image via cheat-sheet.com

Additionally, do not be surprised if local taxpayers will be stuck with covering upwards of $10 million or more in other college shortfalls both to date as well as at a later date via other likely impending grifts.

But what the hay, it’s not like Mayor Koch is ponying up upwards of $700 million of his own money to fund these spending grifts on top of the many hundreds of millions that he has already spent or will soon be spending in ways often fraught with all manner of disconcerting problems.

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