Even bigger borrowing and spending is coming up on the near horizon
The Standard-Examiner reports that the Ogden City Council last night embarked on the next stage of implementing its 2012 water rates re-set fiasco, which it meekly and ineptly approved , over substantial lumpencitizen objection, on May 22, 2012. As a followup to borrowing a cool $1 million from the sewer fund, the Standard's Mitch Shaw reports that "[t]he city council adopted a resolution Tuesday night to issue $4.5 million in bonds to fix a century-old water pipeline that supplies Ogden with much of its water":
We forewarn that even bigger borrowing and spending is coming up on the near horizon, whereby Ogden City rate payers will be ultimately burdened by at least $13 million in additional long-term, relatively high interest rate bonding, for a project which could otherwise have been more prudently and inexpensively financed, for the most part, by simply "tapping" existing cash reserves and current revenues.
Don't let the cat get your tongues, O Gentle Ones.
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3 comments:
Unless something has changed (and there's no indication in the article that anything has), this particular set of bonds is a good deal for the city because the interest rate is so low. I don't understand the details, but there seems to be some kind of state subsidy involved.
It's next year's $13 million bonds that we should be concerned about.
Meanwhile, the FY2012 Q4 unaudited financial data is now posted on transparent.utah.gov. From this data it appears that the city's water fund came out about $1.4 million ahead of budget, mostly due to lower expenses. Sewer fees raised about $1 million more than the budget called for, but we knew that would happen. Storm sewer fees came out about $400,000 lower than anticipated. Haven't yet taken a careful look at expenses for sewer or storm sewer.
Wow! Great website. Thanks for the link!
Yeah, transparent.utah.gov now has two full years of Ogden City financial transaction records. You need some context to interpret most of the information, but if you take the time to really figure it out, it's quite informative.
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