The City will be borrowing $6.5 million at 3.26% to fund some SUPER important projects.
Some of them sound worthy – like water treatment.
Several look very unworthy – like the Hostess House ‘facelift’ and landscaping for the $1.5 million fiasco known as the Jack Calvert building.
The most ridiculous part of this borrowing is that the Feds just handed Lampasas almost TWO MILLION DOLLARS in unsolicited “Covid relief funds”. They got $971,000 last August and will get ANOTHER $971,000 this summer.
They literally had TWO MILLION fall into their laps late last year and they are STILL borrowing more for dubious projects.
I guess it’s kinda hard to make ends meet when LEDC prez Misti Talbert grabbed the first half of it for her idiotic Business Pork project. I believe the other half was mostly spent on a new fire engine (which we won’t get for another 12 to 18 months, thanks to the Brandon Administration wrecking the supply chains).
This is a 20-year bond (August 2042) but can be paid off (called) after nine years at the earliest.
That means they are on the hook for at LEAST 9 years of interest payments – which means $211,900 in annual interest times NINE. Or $1.907 million.
Ergo, they didn’t just put you on the hook for $6.5 million. It’s $8.407 million
If they DON’T (or CAN’T) pay it off early and it runs the entire 20 years, the total interest runs to $2.9 million. Or a grand total of $9,400,000.00 burden on the taxpayer.
Don’t worry though, according to TJ Monroe, “typically, we are able to pay those down within the nine years and have saved a substantial amount of money”.
Hm. Perhaps.
Or perhaps with the Fed finally raising rates back to normal, thus cratering the stock market and the housing market and causing a deep (and much-needed) recession, the City won’t have the ridiculous always-increasing sales tax and other tax revenue to rely on and find themselves screwed by the debt burden.
Time will tell.