Free Republic

Amazon said Thursday that it will spend $5 billion to build another headquarters in North America to house 50,000 new employees. In April, workers constructed three glass-covered domes in an expansion of the company’s downtown Seattle campus. Amazon made the sort of announcement Thursday morning that mayors dream about. The tech juggernaut said it was looking for the right city in which to build its “HQ2”: a second headquarters in North America, equal to its campus in Seattle. And it’s going to make that selection process a public one, akin to how cities bid to host an Olympic Games. “We...

In 2010, the police department in Rutledge, Tenn., was riven by scandal. The police chief, a 12-year department veteran, had been charged with assault and was under investigation by state authorities. But that wasn't what Mayor Danny Turley cited when he fired the top cop that year. Turley "had no choice," he said--his "hands were tied"--because the city could have lost its liability insurance if the chief kept his job. That would have left Rutledge responsible for paying out on future lawsuits, potentially crippling its small budget. So the insurance company got its way, and a police officer got an...

Call it Pennsylvania’s highway robbery. A pot of money from a huge increase in fuel taxes and motorist fees under a 2013 law designed to shore up Pennsylvania’s highways and bridges is not so huge anymore, as a growing amount is getting diverted to the Pennsylvania State Police. Now, alarmed transportation planners, construction firms and engineers are looking at 12-year Department of Transportation projections that show a fattening state police budget consuming more dollars for construction projects. Lawmakers are taking notice, too.

 Atwater. This farm city in the Central Valley declared a fiscal emergency in October with a $3 million deficit and appeared poised for a bankruptcy filing. City leaders say they pulled the city back from the brink after winning concessions from unions to cut costs. The deal cuts pay 5% for city workers, including police. Last month, voters approved a half-point sales tax increase to 8%. The city has cut jobs but struggled as costs on a new water treatment plant exceeded $85 million in bond financing.• Azusa. This city east of Los Angeles saw its credit rating downgraded...

There are a lot of hard-headed people out in the investment and banking world. Most of them are hard-headed because they have never known anything else. A few are a bit smarter -- they know that their business model is cooked if the underlying assumptions change and they're being intentionally dishonest in trying to grab the last few nickels in front of the steamroller, and to hell with you (their customer.) Then there are those who have it figured out and are attempting to find a way to adapt to what is going to happen. More than 30 years ago...

Half a million Californians now live in bankrupt cities, as San Bernardino joins Stockton in declaring insolvency thanks to a $46 million deficit (a smaller city also declared bankruptcy this month). Lest anyone think this was a result solely of the 2008 housing bubble and financial crisis, Reuters reports that: the city attorney general James Penman said San Bernardino’s city officials had been submitting false accounting documents for 13 of the last 16 years in an effort to hide the real financial situation of the city. San Bernardino’s mayor since 2006, Patrick Morris, said he had never heard of allegations...

Last week we find out Disability Claims equal employment numbers in terms of increase.In the Stimulus, a great deal of the money went to Obama's constituencies i.e Muni-based Unions, Police, Fire and Teachers to keep them afloat as revenues declined locally and to maybe further the federal roll in that area.At approx. the same time Meredith Whitney was on a screed about the coming Muni-Bond potential default problem.With that as a backdrop, many here are aware of phenomenon of certain Muni jobs where the Disabilty payments just before retiring are greater that retiring healthy.So, are some of these Muni workers...

U.S. states and localities have more than $2 trillion of unfunded pension liabilities, Moody's Investors Service said on Monday, citing data on plans offered by 8,500 local governments and over 14,000 individual entities. The total liabilities for fiscal 2010 were more than three times the amount reported by local governments. "Pension liabilities are widely acknowledged to be understated," Moody's Managing Director Timothy Blake said. Most state fiscal years end on June 30. The rising cost of public pensions has strained finances for cities around the country. Stockton, California, which last week became the biggest U.S. city to file for Chapter...

Meredith Whitney, who predicted the global financial meltdown, is now saying that the next credit crisis that threatens financial stability is at the local levels - cities with crushing debt burdens that may cause a rain of defaults: Meredith Whitney, the US research analyst who correctly predicted the global credit crunch, described local and state debt as the biggest problem facing the US economy, and one that could derail its recovery."Next to housing this is the single most important issue in the US and certainly the biggest threat to the US economy," Whitney told the CBS 60 Minutes programme on...

Municipal Pathologies Come To A Head By Frederick Sheehan 07/07/10 North Weymouth, Massachusetts — Discussions about municipal finance generally assume three absolute conditions. First, the principal and coupon of municipal bonds are guaranteed: “Municipal bonds don’t default,” according to trusted experts. Second, the guarantees are backed by the taxing authority of the state or municipality. Third, accrued pension benefits are guaranteed. It is universally believed (and rightly so) that services provided to those who pay taxes are not guaranteed. In this formulation, the taxpayers are the true victims of injudicious and ignorant spending on the part of municipal governments. Federal...

On April 20, New Jersey voters backed Gov. Chris Christie in the first test of his drive to pull their state back from the fiscal brink -- producing record turnout as they rejected 58 percent of school budgets. But the war is far from over -- and must extend far beyond property taxes. Having successfully challenged the New Jersey Education Association's decades-long control over the public purse, the governor is now moving to tackle the issues that drove so many voters to the polls: crushing property taxes and out-of-control spending. Christie yesterday released a package of 33 bills -- which...

When it comes to municipal pension plans, Pennsylvania is king. Pennsylvania has four times more pension funds than any other state, and more than one-fourth of all the municipal pension plans in the country, according to the Public Employee Retirement Commission, an agency that advises the Legislature on pension issues and oversees the soundness of local plans. The number of local plans is growing by about 30 a year. Most of the 3,100 retirement systems, for police, firefighters or nonuniformed workers, are small. That's costly for members and taxpayers. Of 2,462 that reported administrative expenses, the cost was $36 million,...

ATLANTA - Thomas Settles grew up on a dirt road in Edgefield, S.C., a road so crummy it washed out completely after a heavy rain and he sometimes couldn't get to school. Summers were spent choking at the road's dust. Now 53, Settles owns a paving company in Atlanta and is on a mission to save poor Southerners from the indignities he grew up with. He's out to make dirt roads as good as paved ones. "Look at this," he says, holding up a plastic jug of molasses-looking brown stuff. "This is all it takes." The brown stuff is an...

China activates bomb shelters Intelligence sources suspect reopening to public is part of strategic deception Posted: June 28, 2005 1:00 a.m. Eastern © 2005 WorldNetDaily.com China's decision to open up massive bomb shelters to the public, ostensibly to provide a respite from summer heat, has U.S. intelligence analysts concerned about a possible strategic deception by Beijing, reports Joseph Farah's G2 Bulletin. The government made a high-profile public announcement, carried by the official Xinhua news agency, this week that bomb shelters in central Chongqing would be opened to the public to allow residents to cool off during a heat wave in...

WASHINGTON--When Philadelphia's city government decided to sell wireless access to downtown residents last year, a furious political fight in the state capital erupted. Verizon stridently opposed the plan, liberal advocacy groups just as emphatically endorsed it, and politicians in Harrisburg ended up approving a compromise bill that effectively let the city of brotherly love do what it wanted. Now this politechnical dispute is bubbling up from states to Washington, D.C., where lobbyists are pressuring Congress to resolve the question of whether governments or private companies do a better job as Internet service providers.

April 2005 Housing's 800-Pound GorillaHomeowners associations are growing in numbers and power.By James B. GoodnoNevada state senator Michael Schneider was on his way to an important floor session a couple of years ago when his secretary insisted he take a phone call. An angry constituent was on the line. She wasn't mad at Schneider, but she was mad at the president of her homeowners association, whom she was holding at gunpoint on her front stoop.Schneider managed to diffuse the situation, but it was emblematic. While many residents are happy in their common-interest communities or developments ? the condominiums, cooperatives,...

<p>A silent killer is methodically choking Pennsylvania to death: State and local government continues to grow and, with it, increased government spending, according to the president of the state manufacturers' association. One outgrowth of the continuing ratcheting-up of spending is the ongoing demise of manufacturing within the Commonwealth, Jim Panyard said. One only has to look at the number of state, local and federal government jobs as of last December, versus the number of manufacturing jobs, to understand something is radically wrong.</p>