To excerpt the financing options,

• Option 1 entails borrowing $6M from the City’s cash portfolio for the duration of the construction period, i.e. June 1, 2011 to September 30, 2012. During FY 2013 the City would take out a $6M bank loan to repay the City’s portfolio in-full, including the interest the portfolio would have earned if the loan had not been made.  The first year of debt service would be FY 2013 and would include full payment of the interest due the portfolio.  Debt service with this option is estimated to be $719K in the first year and $569K thereafter.  In addition to the loan amount, the City would have to front an aggregate of $592K (Best Case Scenario), $647K (Most Likely Scenario) and $841K (Worst Case Scenario) during FYs 2011 to 2013 with payback of this amount starting in FY 2014.

• Option 2 entails taking out a $6M bank loan during the last four months of FY 2011. The first year for debt service would be FY 2012.  Debt service for the life of the loan is estimated to be $569K/year.  In addition to the loan amount, the City would have to front an aggregate of $1.071M (Best Case Scenario), $1.116M (Most Likely Agenda Date:  August 16, Special Meeting Scenario) and $1.163M (Worst Case Scenario) during FYs 2011 to 2013 with payback of this amount starting in FY 2014.

• Option 3 entails borrowing $7M during the last four months of FY 2011.  The City would capitalize the interest that normally would have been paid in FY 2012 and pay it out over the life of the loan, i.e. eliminating the debt service in FY 2012.  The first year of debt service would be FY 2013 and is estimated to be $664K/year.  In addition to the loan amount, the City would have to front an aggregate of $596K (Best Case Scenario), and $641K (Most Likely Scenario) during FYs 2011 to 2013 with payback of this amount starting in FY 2014.  In the Worst Case Scenario the
City would have to front $1.008M during FYs 2011 to 2016 and would keep having to supplement the project for several years until revenues were sufficient to breakeven.

Click here to download the backup material described above. Discuss with vigor in comment thread below.

Update: The Lake Worth City Commission voted to proceed with the beach casino building rehabilitation; and to pursue financing option one, as outlined above. The vote, taken at a Special Meeting of the commission on Monday August 16th, was 4-1.

The government report also fails to account for the effect of vast, underwater plumes of microscopic droplets of oil that remain unmeasured, scientists said, and it downplays the potential long-term effects of the release of as much as 4.1 million barrels of oil in the Gulf of Mexico. Some 800,000 barrels were captured at the wellhead.

The remaining 50 percent in the water is the equivalent of almost eight Exxon Valdez oil spills, until now the country’s benchmark environmental disaster.

Read the piece from McClatchy here.

Some are suggesting that BP’s unprecedented use of chemical dispersants, much of it injected directly at the gushing wellhead, may have rendered much of the oil unretrievable, suspended in great quantity and in a probably harmful solution at intermediary depths of the ocean.

In two useful articles from Mother Jones, read about the dispersant they used here. And then more about the mesopalegic zone of the ocean here.

… the Corexit dispersant BP has flooded onto the leaking wellhead 5,000 feet down, and sprayed from the air onto the surface—some 2 million gallons in total—is designed to break up the oil. “Which one is it?” asks Safina. “Do you want to contain it or disperse it? It makes absolutely no sense to be doing both. Let’s face it, with pollution, you count your lucky stars if you have what’s called point-source pollution, that is, a single identifiable localized source of pollution, like the Deepwater Horizon. So what’s BP doing with that? They’re turning it into the worst pollution nightmare of them all: non-point-source pollution.”

That’s because untreated oil quickly rises to the surface, where it can be skimmed with relative ease. But treated with dispersant, it becomes a submerged plume, unlikely to ever float to the surface …

In other news from the spill, the Feds lifted the fishing ban off the Florida panhandle, and Louisiana shrimpers will be sailing when the season opens on August 16.

Use the comment thread for discussion, or leaving other links.

President Obama talks like an immigration moderate, in practice his actions are those of an unapologetic immigration hawk who has tightened border security without fulfilling his promise of immigration reform. The administration has been deporting illegal immigrants at a higher rate than the Bush administration and is deploying unmanned drones and more than a thousand National Guard troops to secure the border. On Tuesday, with the administration’s support, Congress approved more funding for border security, deploying more resources to border security and adding more Border Patrol agents, law enforcement, and drones to the effort.

Read Serwers’ complete August 12 article here.

Discuss and provide additional links for further reading in the comments thread.

Now, I’m not sure that this doesn’t fall into the ‘wrong headed question’ category, (it’s kind of like asking, who was the president who presided over the most jobs growth from 1977-1980? There really is only one answer.) I’ll take the question at face value and try to offer some data.

Here is a short piece from Michael Mandel at Bloomberg/Business Week which might further the discussion. Mandel posits that private sector jobs growth on a historical basis was comparatively non-existent over most of the last decade -which would include the eight out of ten years representing the two administrations of a single president.

Mandel calls this a “lost decade for jobs,” and says that its “impossible to overstate how bad this is.” And his analysis doesn’t stop there. This statistical picture grows even worse and “gives the private sector too much credit.” Why?

Remember that the private sector includes health care, social assistance, and education, all areas which receive a lot of government support. I’ve been talking about the HealthEdGov sector.

Most of the industries which had positive job growth over the past ten years were in the HealthEdGov sector. In fact, financial job growth was nearly nonexistent once we take out the health insurers.

Mandel’s conclusion,

Without a decade of growing government support from rising health and education spending and soaring budget deficits, the labor market would have been flat on its back.

BFG, I’m not hating, I’m just saying. And maybe you’re not either. It’s hard to tell from your questions whether you’re trying to pump the Bush record, or saying ease up on Obama he was handed the mother of all post-war recessions.  Mandel’s Bloomberg/Business Week piece is here.

In counties around the nation road surfaces are being downgraded, with loose gravel replacing loose change. From Alabama to the Dakotas the trend to downgrading road surfaces is rearing its dusty head as counties find themselves facing budget shortfalls and rising costs for pavement replacement. That’s the story told in this Wall Street Journal article from July, 17 2010.

Paved roads, historical emblems of American achievement, are being torn up across rural America and replaced with gravel or other rough surfaces as counties struggle with tight budgets and dwindling state and federal revenue. State money for local roads was cut in many places amid budget shortfalls.

A crafty Journal editor refers to this as “reclaiming” the asphalt road.

Rebuilding an asphalt road today is particularly expensive because the price of asphalt cement, a petroleum-based material mixed with rocks to make asphalt, has more than doubled over the past 10 years. Gravel becomes a cheaper option once an asphalt road has been neglected for so long that major rehabilitation is necessary.

Read the whole Wall Street Journal article here.

Notice that adding new jobs at a rate of 200,000 a month would take us 150 months — or 12.5 years — to get back to normalcy. So far, only April has seen more than 200,000 in non-census jobs growth — and even then, just barely.

The Washington Posts‘s Klein found the chart appended to an article about the economy at the Brookings Institute website highlighting (irony?) “America’s increasingly distressed communities.” Here is the chart,

Brookings explains the data,

In June, the economy lost 125,000 jobs, largely due to layoffs of temporary Census employees. In the private sector, employment increased by 83,000 jobs. Thus far this year, the economy has added 882,000 jobs, with 593,000 coming from the private sector. The unemployment rate fell to 9.5 percent, but more Americans exited the labor force and the share of the population employed edged down.

Looking ahead, there are several challenges to sustained job growth. The boost to economic activity from the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act is winding down and job losses related to temporary Census workers will continue in July. Further, the four-week moving average of initial claims for unemployment insurance have hit their highest level since March and have remained above 450,000 all year.

The prognosis,

How long will it take to erase this gap? If future job growth continues at a rate of roughly 208,000 jobs per month, the average monthly job creation for the best year for job creation in the 2000s, it would take 136 months (more than 11 years). In a more optimistic scenario, with 321,000 jobs created per month, the average monthly job creation for the best year in the 1990s, it would take over 57 months (almost 5 years)

Read the whole Brookings article here. Reading down you will discover another chart ranking Florida second among states for the size of it’s job gap, enumerated as 699,719 jobs; more than double the gap of tenth ranked Texas.

More than 27,000 abandoned oil and gas wells lurk in the hard rock beneath the Gulf of Mexico, an environmental minefield that has been ignored for decades.  [...]

Regulations for temporarily abandoned wells require oil companies to present plans to reuse or permanently plug such wells within a year, but the AP found that the rule is routinely circumvented, and that more than 1,000 wells have lingered in that unfinished condition for more than a decade. About three-quarters of temporarily abandoned wells have been left in that status for more than a year, and many since the 1950s and 1960s — even though sealing procedures for temporary abandonment are not as stringent as those for permanent closures. [...]

The fact there are so many wells that have been classified for decades as temporarily abandoned suggests that paperwork can be shuffled at [the Department of the Interior's Minerals Management Service] without any real change beneath the water.

Read the whole piece from the AP here.

That fact constituent to an article published over the holiday weekend in The New York Times. In fact, says the Times,

… an examination of the American tax code indicates that oil production is among the most heavily subsidized businesses, with tax breaks available at virtually every stage of the exploration and extraction process.

The article explains that at the same time BP garnered big tax breaks for leasing the rig, “the owner, Transocean, moved its corporate headquarters from Houston to the Cayman Islands in 1999 and then to Switzerland in 2008, maneuvers that also helped it avoid taxes.”

So, essentially, the U.S. taxpayer paid BP to lease a rig that was incorporated in a foreign country for the purpose of avoiding the U.S. corporate tax.

ThinkProgress.org says the U.S. tax code is “riddled” with such tax breaks.

The Obama administration is proposing tightening these subsidies, and the oil industry is trying to tar that proposal as a new tax at the same time -you guessed it- they spend money lobbying against the changes.

The Center for American Progress outlines nine separate subsidies available to the oil industry from the U.S. government. The big five -ExxonMobil, Chevron, Conoco Phillips, Shell, and BP- reportedly spent more than $65 million on lobbying in 2008, up from $37 million in 2007. 2008 profits ranged from $45.2 billion for ExxonMobil to $21.1 billion for BP. An oil industry group defends the tax breaks,

The American Petroleum Institute, an industry advocacy group, argues that even with subsidies, oil producers … pay a higher percentage of their earnings in taxes than most other American corporations.

Even before the Deepwater Horizon crime tragedy, in March 2009 the Center for American Progress reported,

The Obama administration believes that oil companies don’t need any more money from taxpayers. Testifying before Congress on March 3, Office of Management and Budget Director Peter Orzsag urged elimination of some taxpayer support for big oil companies. “Although the administration supports the responsible production of oil and natural gas as part of a comprehensive energy strategy, excessive government subsidies distort market signals and slow the transition of the economy from fossil fuels to clean, renewable sources of energy.”

As for BP and public health and safety this report from the Center for Public Integrity leads,

Two refineries owned by oil giant BP account for 97 percent of all flagrant violations found in the refining industry by government safety inspectors over the past three years, a Center for Public Integrity analysis shows. Most of BP’s citations were classified as “egregious willful” by the Occupational Safety and Health Administration and reflect alleged violations of a rule designed to prevent catastrophic events at refineries.

And those health and safety violations appear likely to be ongoing. According to this recent report about a runaway chemical release just before the gulf oil rig blowout,

The release from the BP facility here began April 6 and lasted forty days. It stemmed from the company’s decision to keep producing and selling gasoline while it attempted repairs on a key piece of equipment, according to BP officials and Texas regulators. [...]

But a look at BP’s record in running the Texas City refinery adds to the mounting evidence that the company’s corporate culture favors production and profit margins over safety and the environment. The 40-day release echoes in several notable ways the runaway spill in the Gulf. BP officials initially underestimated the problem and took steps in the days leading up to the incident to reduce costs and keep the refinery online.

So now we know. Oil and gas exploration and production can be costly is dangerous for workers, the environment, and taxpayers. And as for the API dishing on their corporate brethern over taxes, thanks for the heads up.

Photo credit:  AP Photo/Dave Martin

Illinois appears poised to surpass California in terms of budget woes. See the coverage in The New York Times here.

Meanwhile, in California, Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger is seeking to cut state workers wages to the federal minimum at least until the state’s budget is balanced. Coverage here.

Here in Florida one consequence of the state’s budget woes is an extraordinary hike in tuition at the state’s 11 public universities: 15 percent in the coming academic year. That’s a 32 percent hike in just two years. All in all more than twenty states are facing serious shortfalls. The Center on Budget and Policy Priorities has a good wrap-up here.

For three consecutive years, the national recession both has brought on declines in state and local revenues and increased need for public programs as residents lose jobs, income, and health insurance. In the 2009 fiscal year, the imbalance between available revenues and what was needed for services opened up budget gaps in most states, and the vast majority of states faced additional shortfalls in the 2010 fiscal year. But the gaps will be even larger for 2011.

As usual they also provide this helpful visual representation,

The American Prospect looks at the yin and the yang of the issue. Tim Fernholz opines,

For instance, one factor driving states’ fiscal crises was their willingness to cut taxes when times were good — and property values were high and increasing. While this unbalance needs to be corrected with a reasonable increase in taxes, raising taxes during a recession will just drive an economy-hurting cycle … States are already making hard choices and cutting their budgets, but this money would allow them to keep vital services moving forward — and people employed.

Watch for continued cuts in services from the states and local governments: lay-offs of state workers -including teachers and public safety workers, decreased aid to local governments and increased fees for services that remain.

If you have a favorite building in Lake Worth email the address to tnrolw@gmail.com. the new record will swing around and get photographs, and together we can compile our own gallery.

Photo credit:  Iwan Baan