Posted on 06/29/2014 4:54:35 AM PDT by SkyPilot
Nicole Hill holds up her past-due water bill at her home in Detroit. Her water has been off for about six weeks.
It has been six weeks since the city turned off Nicole Hill's water.
Dirty dishes are piled in the sink of her crowded kitchen, where the yellow-and-green linoleum floor is soiled and sticky. A small garbage can is filled with water from a neighbor, while a bigger one sits outside in the yard, where she hopes it will collect some rain. She's developed an intricate recycling system of washing the dishes, cleaning the floor and flushing the toilet with the same water.
"It's frightening, because you think this is something that only happens somewhere like Africa," said Hill, a single mother who is studying homeland security at a local college. "But now I know what they're going through — when I get somewhere there's a water faucet, I drink until my stomach hurts."
Hill is one of thousands of residents in Detroit who have had their water and sewer services turned off as part of a crackdown on customers who are behind on their bills. In April, the city set a target of cutting service to 3,000 customers a week who were more than $150 behind on their bills. In May, the water department sent out 46,000 warnings and cut off service to 4,531. The city says that cutting off water is the only way to get people to pay their bills as Detroit tries to emerge from bankruptcy — the utility is currently owed $90 million from customers, and nearly half the city's 300,000 or so accounts are past due.
(Excerpt) Read more at latimes.com ...
If you use water, you have to pay for it. The solution to poor Nicole’s problem would seem to be simple: pay your damned water bill like everyone else!
LOL. You must be very cold hearted on this Sunday morning. < /sarc>
Well put.
We were in Dearborn (at Greenfield Village) yesterday. Later that day we stopped at the Dearborn Mall and I noticed a dark smoke cloud that in the distance. I approached the family that was entering the mall if an accident had happened. (I thought it was a plane accident.)
He told me it was in Detroit and there was a controlled burn by the city of Detroit. We were surprised to actual see the smoke fire..
(True story.)
Twenty years ago I saw gibsmedats at state college; they are simply moving funds from one agency to another. They often don’t have an eighth-grade education (we’ve had social promotion here in NJ for decades), and after wasting a couple of semesters in remedial classes (to bring affirmative action tokens up to their white peers’ high school level - they get no college credit for them) they simply drop out.
People looking for instant gratification aren’t going to invest four years of their time (and our money) in anything; they wouldn’t even do it for a week-long job training session. Our permanent underclass (not the newly-poor unemployed) have no role in the workplace; they haven’t “fit” in decades. They truly have no aspirations beyond breeding a bastard for the freebies.
Turn the water back on. But add a little something to it. . . (evil grin)
She’s got plenty of money and space for tats though.
LOL. OK, dumb ass, then go wash yourself in the Great Lakes.
“said Hill, a single mother who is studying homeland security at a local college.”
You mean something got on that?!?!?!?
Oh and she’s studying to grope you at the airport too, likely on the taxpayer’s dime all around.
And I do mean all around.
Nicole Hill IS the very face of Detroit. Black, obese, can’t pay her bills yet has enough money to get her hair streaked and her chest tattooed. She can’t pay her water bill but that clearly hasn’t made her miss any Happy Meals.
I don’t doubt that what you say is true.
I guess I expect too much from the world. I don’t expect too much from this woman, but I’d like to think that the professionals who work at the Water department would be able to figure out that something must be wrong if one household has a bill this astronomical. But no, they are happy to ask the woman to pay thousands of dollars that she legitimately does not, or should not, owe.
You know, I’m pretty smart and I make a decent wage, and I find some of the people you encounter in these places impossible to deal with. And I often wonder about those who do not have the intellectual, or language, skills that I have.
What happens to those people? I wonder.
Well, this article shows one example of what can happen.
This woman might be stupid, lazy, self-indulgent and have a million other failings. That doesn’t mean it’s OK to rip her off.
They must think that all you have to do is stick a tube into Lake Huron and the water magically makes it to the faucet.
Fresh water =/= drink it right from the lake.
OK, well, what you see in the photos is, oddly enough, NOT Obama’s Fault. It’s Johnson’s fault.
This entire “crisis” is a manifestation of generations of bad behavior and choices rewarded and coddled and subsidized. It won’t go away with the next Republican President - but that person could start the process. I’d say that it will take about as long to “fix” it as it took to create it - about 50 years. And I certainly don’t think that the described behavior is unique to one race. The fact is, that all the “smart” people, of all races left Detroit 20-30 years ago at the latest, with the exception of some very brave entrepreneurs.
All of these rewards and subsidies for bad choices and bad behavior have essentially been a “payoff” so that people don’t riot. The bottom line is that simple. When the country was wealthy and there weren’t that many people making these bad choices, the system seemed to work, but the underlying problem just got worse and worse. Now...
People actually DID have children at 16 with no job, no income, and no father in the 40’s and 50’s. Their lives were hell from that point on, their peers noticed this, and they decided that doing so wasn’t a good idea. Same with dropping out, getting in trouble with the law, not developing some kind of marketable skill, and so on.
The “free stuff” spigot needs to be turned off - but very slowly, over years, maybe decades.
She obviously has not been skimping on the food budget.
>>that she’s lived there 5 years and she owes almost $6,000. <<
Equals approximately $100 per month.
Why should Detroit’s suburbs pay for these freeloaders’ water?
There may be a depression, but the stories in this article aren’t an indication of it. These are symptoms of a completely dysfunctional culture, and are similar to what you find on almost any Indian reservation in North America.
From Urban Dictionary:
“Gibs-Me-Dat” (Ebonics) (n.) 1. Annuities, in the form of goods, services, or material (usually welfare checks) given predominately to blacks, in exchange for their tacit agreement to reciprocate by not burning down America’s cities.
Example:
“Yo Trayvon, who you be votin' fo'?”
“I gots to go wit Obama, baby. The democrats be givin out moe betta gibsmedat.”
2. (n) One who accepts said annuities.
Synonymous with: tribute, baksheesh, Danegeld, reparations
“This woman might be stupid, lazy, self-indulgent and have a million other failings. That doesn’t mean it’s OK to rip her off.”
I’d’ really like to see a breakdown of that water bill. Certainly, a lot of that bill is a subsidy for OTHER non-paying customers and also for the bad planning of Detroit, in trying to maintain water for 700,000 people in a distribution system designed to handle two million. This is clearly NOT her responsibility.
Speaking of “not her responsibility”, I pay a rather high water bill in an area blessed with torrents of fresh, clean water. I live in a new subdivision with very considerable state-of-the-art water and sewage infrastructure that was built into the (high) cost of my home. I am paying (by EPA mandate, by the way) to upgrade the older, poorer parts of the city that the city didn’t maintain and the citizens didn’t spend any money on for 75 years.
Exactly. Grab a bucket and head for the beach.
The whole thing was planned by the administration. Not paying their water bill was something they were told to do.
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