— News about Quincy with commentary added.

REJECTED!!!
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Quincy Quarry Weekly Fish Wrap: Rejected yet again!

The financial hits keep coming Quincy Mayor Thomas P. Koch’s way as well as oh so deservedly so.

Last week Mayor Koch copped a plea with the Environmental Protection Agency (“EPA”) for a minimum of a hundred million dollar fix-it ticket given a decade of spilling sewerage into the Boston Harbor via leaks in city sewers.

That and also dumping all manner of prohibited effluents dumped into the harbor via the city’s separate stormwater drain system.

Further, La Kocha Nostra is looking at thirteen years on essentially de facto parole under the supervision of the EPA even if worse would surely be understandable, if not also well-warranted.

Quincy Quarry knows to follow the money!
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While 100 large is unarguably large, Mayor Koch is conversely on record as foisting a dubious position that covering the $8 million average annual outlay over the next unlucky thirteen years to repair and replace only a modest portion of the city sewer and drain system per the pleading out matches up with the $6 million to $8 million the city is currently spending on sewer and drain repair and replacement citywide will be sufficient to cover the nut and the EPA ordered work.

There is a fatal problem, however, with this spoken effluent.

Reacting to his water and sewer bill
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This claim only works if no work other than on the EPA-ordered work will be done for the next thirteen years or – as well as far more likely – local water and sewer bills are going to go up to pay for also needed repairs elsewhere.

Up a likely whole lot more as well as for a number of decades yet to come.

And then earlier this week, Mayor Koch saw his plans to rely on a thirty-year bond to so as to duck suffering serious pain to his profligate spending habits go down in flames. 

Tommy’s free-spending ways get a haircut
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The pain is care of the current sixteen-year balloon payment schedule mandated by the Massachusetts Public Employee Retirement Administration Commission to fund the city’s woefully underfunded employee pension fund cut short.

How woeful?  Within but three spots away from the bottom of the list of government employee pension funds in the Commonwealth.

The Quincy City Council, however, whacked Mayor Koch’s plan to kick the can down the road – wicked way down the road – via a thirty-year $475 million pension bond issuance with two in the hat by mandating a no more than twenty-year term on his breathtaking ask to issue nearly half a billion dollars in municipal bond debt.

Burn baby burn.
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That and so pretty double the amount of the city’s outstanding, pending, and other impending debt.

Subjet to, that is, whatever bond maturity term the Commonwealth allows when the Koch Maladministration might actually be able to submit the needed material to endeavor to secure state approval to then issue the upwards of $475 million bond issuance to then invest with the hope of so fully funding the City of Quincy’s woefully underfunded employee pension fund.

HIs free-spending ways are looking to suffer a haircut
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In turn, Mayor Koch is thus now looking at an $8 million to $14 million increase in spending in FY 2022 given that the City Council refused to allow the mayor to kick the can of fully funding the city employee pension from the current by 2037 mandate out by roughly doubling it until 2052 via the use of 30-year bonds.

In other words, think rolling over a mortgage with 15 years to go to a new 30-year mortgage so as to reduce the annual nut but at the same time double the number of years of getting nutted as well as getting them squeezed for considerably greater interest expense.

As such, he is now looking at having to cut his proposed budget, increase property taxes, or some combination of both once he knows how long a bond term he will be allowed to issue by the appropriate State of Massachusetts oversight entities.

And if state approval does not happen in time, Mayor Koch would instead be looking at an even higher $18 million problem with his current budget proposal when property tax rates are set in December.

Koch and mirrors, legerdemain – whatever
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Even so, he continues to plan to use a significant chunk of the $46 million in federal COVID relief aid to buy a run-down old building as the site for a likely to run upwards of $200 million all costs included proposal to build his most grandiose Edifice Complex project proposal yet: a bombastic new City Hall as well as a home for losing millions hand over fist Quincy College after the City Council made it clear that they would not approve funding it.

In short, Koch & mirrors as usual even if it is ever-increasingly clear that ever more locals are tired of his act.

What can happen when the basta point is past
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Wicked tired of it.

Unfortunately, Mayor Koch has roughly thirty months to go in his current term in office.

That and is in a looking to unlucky thirteenth year in office.

Then again, there are ways that his time could be cut short.

All sorts of ways.

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