Question

A small local government has decided to borrow money to improve infrastructure by floating bonds or levying special assessments on the local community for using the transportation facilities created due to increasing number of city dwellers moving into the town. They work in the city and need to commute to work.

Required:

Discuss the implications for the local government’s credit rating and debt limits.

Statistical information of the area: Mostly retired people over 50 live here and the area is attracting working professionals who are moving into the area in larger numbers. Their needs dominate the improvements to infrastructure. Use facts in the text discussions to deal with these issues in your answer.

Answer 1

1) Mayors are elected officials who are closest to the people. Hence, they witness a myriad of complex issues on the spot and spend their entire political career trying to sort them out. At any given time, mayors are expected to be fulfilling the mandate in which they were elected, representing their constituents at various levels of government, acting as ambassadors on behalf of their country when abroad and managing the daily operations of their cities to name a few.

2) On occasion, they are also faced with unique circumstances that are often a result of factors beyond the municipality’s control. The global economic crisis, which compounded into the global unemployment crisis, was the result of an unanticipated shock that was felt throughout all levels of government and severely impacted all regions of the world.

3) National governments looked to their local governments to reduce unemployment and ensure national GDP continued to grow, while at the same time voters looked to their locally elected leaders to lessen the blow that resulted from unemployment and to create meaningful work for all.

4) This year’s UNACLA theme focuses on job creation and local productivity, deploying effective solutions to unemployment- a theme that could not have been timelier while global unemployment stands at over 200 million in 2013. Today, one would be pressed to find a mayor that did not list job creation and local responsibility as a primary pillar of his or her mandate.  

5) Brian Keierleber speaks to groups across America about his innovative techniques to save money on bridge repair in Buchanan County, Iowa. Today, about 10 percent of his county’s bridges are made from converted railroad cars. Some bridges that are torn down are salvaged for their metal and wood planks.

6) As county engineer, he has to figure out how to maintain an infrastructure system in constant need of repair and replacement, while facing a chronic shortage of funds and a mobile public demanding minimal inconvenience.

“There is only so much money,” he says, “so we have to spend it wisely.”

7) Like Keierleber, many of those involved with managing the nation’s infrastructure struggle with how to keep an aging and overtaxed system operating on a vastly underfunded budget. While attention has largely been focused on efforts nationally, there has been a vigorous effort at the local level to use ingenuity and creativity to make the best of a difficult situation.

“People have to be resourceful,” says Brian Roberts, the executive director of the National Association of County Engineers in Washington, DC. “They just have to work smarter.”

8)The expensive requirements to repair the nation’s infrastructure have been well documented. The most recent (2013) report card produced every four years by the American Society of Civil Engineers (ASCE) rates the nation’s infrastructure with a D+ and estimates that the nation needs to invest $3.6 trillion by 2020 to modernise and repair our current systems.