The Financially Broke City of Louisville and Commonwealth of Kentucky Part Two

Long having been a city ran by an incompetent government and business community Louisville, Kentucky has long been ran by incompetent yes men and bureaucrats. This type of quisling behavior has long been noted by those who aren't from the local political class and business community that talks a good game but delivers very little. Of course, that of which they can't steal from either the public treasury or their employees by skimming the little they get in decent pay and benefits from their increasingly smaller paychecks. Maybe that's why Louisville has one of the largest homeless populations in a city with only 770,000 people and a metro population of 1.2 million over several surrounding counties including Louisville Metro but also in Southern Indiana and Central Kentucky also called Kentuckiana.

The interesting thing is that Louisville is supposedly a crossroads of the lower Midwest and upper South but can't seem to get its act together and be able to get out of its own way. This can be noted in the fact that Louisville has a lot of things going for it including a large navigable river, one of the larger airports that could be used for increasing the level of shipping via air of which there is some done. Not to mention near the middle of the Eastern US with links to surrounding cities such as Cincinnati, Nashville, St. Louis, Indianapolis, Chicago, Columbus and many others within a days of driving distance of 12 hours.

Yet it remains a stagnant economic backwater in the Commonwealth of Kentucky which is a state that has long ranked at the bottom of the economic spectrum with ranking 47th in personal income, 47th in family income, 47th in median income, 47th in educational attainment, 43rd in quality of its universities, 41st or worst in K-12 education which it has ranked near the bottom of US states for decades. Even worse is that Kentucky schools are such cesspits of total incompetence that only about 44 percent of high school students in 2018-2019 were proficient or better in high school level reading. Mathematics and science scores are even worse with scores respectively about 40 percent and 36 percent in each category. That's the extent that Kentucky schools have been mismanaged for years along with a state government which has been mismanaged to the extent that its considered the worst ran state government in the entire United States by Governing Magazine.

Even worse is that Kentucky despite billions in revenues over the past decade has been unable to manage its state finances to the point that it has the 3rd worst state pension problem in the United States with a shortfall of 37 billion in 2018 dollars. Considering at that time being only better than California and Illinois who have worse pension problems but also state populations 8 times that of Kentucky in the case of California and 2.5 times that for Illinois. Here's a nice article that discusses this.

https://theintercept.com/2018/10/21/kentucky-pensions-crisis-hedge-funds/

Interesting that Kentucky continues to kick the can down the road while the common people suffer from lack of investment, horrid educational outcomes, a third world infrastructure that is billions overdue on basic investment just to get the road infrastructure graded at an C level by the various engineering societies that grade roads in every state. Despite this, Kentucky just partnered with the neighboring state of Indiana on a 4 billion dollar project to build two new bridges over the Ohio River in Louisville that is relying on tolling existing interstate crossings to pay because Kentucky is so fiscally busted that it cannot afford to pay for it out of existing revenue.

Even worse is that Kentucky's roadways and bridges were ranked at a D level in most of the past several years having received a C- for the year 2019. Here are a couple of articles that discuss this problem of how Kentucky has basically let its infrastructure go to pot so to speak.

https://www.wvxu.org/post/kentucky-receives-c-grade-its-aging-infrastructure#stream/0
https://www.infrastructurereportcard.org/state-item/kentucky/

Of course in Kentucky, priorities are seriously skewed when cities such as Louisville received a brand spanking new basketball arena in 2010 that has never been able to pay for itself out of the TIF financing bonds that were issued and paid for by TIF tax dollars of the Louisville downtown restaurant and bar district. Interestingly though that Louisville between 2010 and 2020 was scheduled to only pay the 15-17 million dollar a year payments just on the interest yet the arena authority and the TIF district fell way below these projections.

Even worse is that the city of Louisville for most of the decade had to pay to keep the arena and the Louisville Arena Authority district financially solvent by the tune of the city first starting payments of 7 million a year which later increased to over 10 million dollars a year over 30 years for whopping total of 300 million dollars. Of which the city of Louisville doesn't even have the money to fix its city employees pension problems as well as fixing city streets and infrastructure. Here's another article about the burgeoning debt of Louisville and its Arena Authority. Of course as usual Louisville strikes out again. These following articles show just about how smart the current and past leaders of Louisville Metro are and how none of the so-called Metro Council political butt kissers do nothing about it.

https://www.constructiondive.com/news/debts-for-kfc-yum-center-stadium-in-louisville-swell-to-1b/527917/

https://www.wdrb.com/news/despite-refinancing-louisville-arena-authority-to-make-higher-annual-kfc/article_60bcdd5b-c141-5f62-8105-819849c21ef9.html

I might also add that Lexington also spent a great deal of money on renovating the 44 year old Rupp Arena over the past several years in order to give it a new look and makeover at a time when the government in Kentucky couldn't pay their debt obligations and started to look for new taxes and fees with which to soak the citizenry. Nothing says priorities more than having two top twenty basketball programs in Kentucky while only 44 percent of students can read at grade level and 1 out of 10 adults have no teeth and have lost all of them due to lack of dental hygiene and poverty. Only in Kentucky could you be so incompetent in a supposedly first world nation.

Meanwhile, Kentucky's politicians of both parties have proven to be such losers that they cannot even stem the tide of the state losing money and becoming increasingly a poverty stricken economic basketcase with limited opportunities for its citizens that they have to increasingly go to other states in order to work and live. Meanwhile the population of Kentucky still increases with now about 20 percent of the state being functionally illiterate at a time of widespread literacy and 90 percent high school graduation rates. Of course, we know that many people pass through school due to social promotion and authorities just having to cover their rear ends to justify keeping their jobs and glossing over those left behind.

Of course, the 120 fiefdoms that consist of the 120 counties of Kentucky have a large number of incompetent and often stupid public officials that shouldn't even be in government to begin with and only get in due to name recognition and family ties. Here's looking at you in making Kentucky and even shittier place to live than it already has been for several decades. Its a good thing that Kentucky residents don't travel a whole lot outside of their little bubble in most rural areas because if they actually got out and experienced much of the United States other than the South they would realize how badly they've been getting screwed over the years.