Municipal Debt : Back Yard Financial Crisis

Another wake up call on how we are taxed locally to finance politicians reelections and pet projects in our own back yards. I'm sure there are a lot of projects in our local communities that are this bad, and maybe worse, that we don't know a thing about them.

Time to start going to our local town meetings to see just what these people are doing to us. If we don't take control then who will?


AMERICA'S MUNICIPAL DEBT RACKET
Source: Steven Malanga, "The authority that runs the new Meadowlands stadium in New Jersey is $830 million in hock," Wall Street Journal, June 14, 2010.

New Jersey officials recently celebrated the selection of the new stadium in the Meadowlands sports complex as the site of the 2014 Super Bowl. Absent from the festivities was any sense of the burden the complex has become for taxpayers, says Steven Malanga, a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute.

Nearly 40 years ago the Garden State borrowed $302 million to begin constructing the Meadowlands. The goal was to pay off the bonds in 25 years. Although the project initially went according to plan, politicians couldn't resist continually refinancing the bonds, siphoning revenues from the complex into the state budget, and using the good credit rating of the New Jersey Sports and Exposition authority to borrow for other, unsuccessful building schemes, says Malanga:


Today, the authority that runs the Meadowlands is in hock for $830 million, which it can't pay back. The state, facing its own cavernous budget deficits, has had to assume interest payments --about $100 million this year on bonds that still stretch for decades.

This tale of woe has become familiar in the world of municipal finance. Governments have loaded up on debt, stretched out repayment times, and used slick maneuvers to avoid constitutional borrowing limits.

While the country's economic troubles have helped expose some of these practices, a sharp decline in tax revenues has prompted more abuse as politicians use long-term debt to kick short-term fiscal problems down the road, says Malanga.


Taxpayers are only slowly realizing that their states and municipalities face long-term obligations that will be increasingly hard to meet. Rick Bookstaber, a senior policy adviser to the Securities and Exchange Commission, recently warned that the muni market has all the characteristics of a crisis that might unfold with "a widespread cascade in defaults." If that painful scenario materializes, it will be because we have too long ignored how some politicians have become addicted to debt, says Malanga.