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

Quincy Center developers and likely top contributors to Mayor Koch’s campaign fund
Conjoined LBC Boston images

In a sign that the silly season is on the horizon, Quincy Quarry personnel out and about the mean streets of Quincy the other day happened upon Quincy Mayor Koch’s new reelection campaign headquarters.

Per the Quarry’s Political and Other Affairs desk, it would appear that this campaign headquarters venue is the largest one ever rented by Mayor Koch as well as the largest one going away.

Additionally as well as ironically, Koch’s latest campaign headquarters is located within his foundering Quincy Center Redevelopment District.

Burn rate, burn baby burn — whatever
Image via oxycom.com

Will his latest reelection bid play out similarly?

Perhaps as far as many long-suffering local taxpayers surely hope.

Specifically, for but one example, over how Mayor Koch has seen well over $300 million spent or approved to be spent in total to endeavor to revitalize long rundown Quincy Center with over $200 million of this spending funded via local taxpayers-backed municipal bonds.

In response to such considerable spending, however, only $250 million or thereabouts in New Development has happened within Quincy Center. 

New “construction work” in A New Quincy Center is but dirt piles from over-budget police HQ project
A Quincy Quarry News exclusive image

Per the usual metrics, such public spending on infrastructure must spur roughly three times as much new development via private investments so as to provide sufficient growth in local tax revenue to cover the debt service nut on public sector debt incurred to pay for public infrastructure and other increased public sector expenses incurred so as to facilitate the new private development.

In turn, while germane data are not transparently provided by the Koch Maladministration, Quincy Quarry News’ Real Estate Development desk was still able to project that Mayor Koch’s pipe dream for “A New Quincy Center” will likely be running several to as much as perhaps a handful of millions in the red in this just begun city budget fiscal year  

Crapping out on A New Quincy Center while betting with taxpayer’s money?
A file image

Key reasons for the red ink?

One is Mayor Koch’s free-spending ways in the hope that developers will come but so far have not sufficiently done so.

And the other: Mayor Koch’s ruinously bad bet on interest rates staying low on roughly $200 million worth of authorized and currently variable interest rate municipal debt he saw undertaken so as to endeavor to sate his Edifice Complex.

Accordingly, local taxpayers citywide will thus long have to cover financial shortfalls on a redevelopment project that Mayor Koch long touted would not only be self-funding, but also would provide property tax relief for long-suffering local taxpayers.

Quincy Taxpayers’ worst nightmare …
A Koch Problem bumper sticker graphic

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The title says it all … An Easy Money Associates/Orion Pictures

Per Quincy Quarry’s financial quants, the shortfall will likely add $75 to $125 (or 1.5% to 2% increase on a percentage basis) to the average assessed value local residential property tax bill come Calendar Year 2024, likely at least a bit more in 2025 as well as is currently looking as likely as not to average costing local taxpayers similarly through 2050 or thereabouts.

In any event, it would thus concurrently appear that the traditionally record-setting spending going away by Koch on a local mayoral election in the Commonwealth other than the mayoral elections in many times larger Boston is yet again likely, if not also even more spending by him than the as much as over $700,000 spent on his previous reelection campaign bids

Not only has he also already rolled out his first of surely innumerable mailings that will be burdening the local postal workers delivering the mail, Mayor Koch has also spent $110,000 with a social media buzz shop over the past near year. 

So far, however, no sign of any buzz for the such big bucks spent, much less an obvious return on this considerable expense. 

Then again, it is not like it is his money — not earned money anyway.

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