Posted by In case you missed it last week, John Archibald of The Birmingham News wishes more people were outraged at the shenanigans in Jefferson County:
What do Jefferson County residents do when they find they’ve been robbed blind by debt, misspending, waste, bribery, corruption and stupidity? Nothing. They sit like lumps, still wondering if the county will build that dome.
As much as these things have been reported, you don’t hear of the citizens’ revolt that you might expect.
A study released last week says the county overpaid bankers by as much as $100 million on its many controversial swap deals. We’ve yelled it for years.
And…
County ratepayers still must pay more than $26 million to fix a pump station built by F.W. Dougherty Engineering, which was never qualified to do the job in the first place. We now know Pat Dougherty bribed county officials to get work…
What does it take?
It’s time county residents woke up and realized they’ve been robbed on an unprecedented scale. If the full cost of the corruption and mismanagement is ever known, my bet is that it will be near a billion dollars.
He had a follow-up column on ways to make waves on these issues.
Maybe it is starting to connect. I had people ask me if I read these columns last week.
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Well… I’m not a Jeffco resident, but it’s still the first time I’ve heard about this and I typically hear the rumbles of Alabama’s most populated county. Maybe most people who don’t read several newspapers daily like me just haven’t heard about it.
Being to wonder if Jefferson County is not a lot like Cook County Illinois, where corruption is accepted by the voters as long as a certain level of service (roads, trash pickup, library, etc) are maintained.
What is it with counties named Jefferson? Colorado has the same problem. http://www.coloradopols.com/showDiary.do?diaryId=3189
Walt, Dan, I don’t know. The cost to taxpayers of the corruption will be far more than the cost of decades worth of the pay raises to the legislators, and when it comes to lining pockets with cash, the Jeffco corruption participants are doing it illegally. But it doesn’t garner the outrage for whatever reason.
If you Google “‘Jefferson County’ corruption sewer,” you get tons of hits, stories, FBI releases, DOJ releases, and so on. Those terms were off the top of my head, probably wouldn’t be hard to think of ones that picked up stories that this search misses.
Colorado Pols, no telling… but interesting observation! Thanks for the link.