Getting in touch with my feeeeelings, I feeeeel a tad rankled in spite of knowledge that I am supposed to live with grace. The source of perturbation is a meeting that went down yesterday. It addressed Innovative Districts. You know what they are, don’t you? We use words to communicate, and we change them when we don’t want to communicate.
Innovative Districts is the alias of Municipal Service Districts. One could Google the latter and read the authorizing legislation with all its repercussions. Googling the former is not particularly helpful. Anyway, the city wants to create three as a means of floating Special Obligation Bonds. Saith the Mountain Xpress:
Such “bonds are an inexpensive way for cities to borrow money,” says Ball. “Because the city would leverage taxes and fees that we don’t [usually] levy. So if for some reason the city defaulted, the lender would be able to collect those revenues.”
One example, Ball says, is sales tax. Since sales tax is a guaranteed form of revenue, banks and other lenders are more amiable to buying up the bonds, since there’s a stable source of revenue that can be collected.
