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| Why are Atlanta water rates the highest in the nation? Because of Black people |
'Skyrocketing water bills mystify, anger residents' was the headline of this story out of the city known as the Black Mecca of America.
Shouldn't that have been enough to give away the answer? In a city that has been completely run - politically - by Black people since Maynard Jackson took power in 1974, wouldn't you wager that one group of people aren't paying their water bills, deferring to those who actually pay their bills higher rates?
Though Atlanta is the city in America with the fastest growing white population, Black residents still comprise 54 percent of the city's inhabitants.
The City too busy to Hate has the highest water bills in America, and the reason is because a significant portion of the Black population (and businesses owned by Black people) simply don't pay their water bills.
Back in 2008, WSBTV did a report showing that the city of Atlanta owed $8 million and that $28 million of uncollected water bills were past due:
The City of Atlanta wants raise water rates by 15 percent. Customers who'll be paying more may be interested to know that thousands of water customers don't bother to pay at all, and many of them are government agencies, starting with the City of Atlanta itself.No problem.The city of Atlanta (full of accounting wizards whom Ernst & Young stated in a 2004 audit of the department had financial employees clearly unqualified for the job: any guess as to the race of the economic titans?) will just write these uncollected water bills off the balance sheet and find new ways to off-set these uncollected bills.
Channel 2's Richard Belcher sorted through the list of delinquent accounts.
The City of Atlanta is looking for ways to close a 9-figure budget shortfall.
Of course, the budget might be in even worse shape if city agencies actually had to pay their water bills.
The list is 158 pages long -- more than 8,000 customers -- a total of $28 million in unpaid bills.
Most are companies and individuals, but it is surprising how many of the big bills are for government agencies.
PDF: City of Atlanta Unpaid Water Bill List
There are at least 36 accounts listed as City of Atlanta with total unpaid bills of nearly $7.9 million.
But that doesn't include the separate account at the city court. The unpaid water bill there is nearly $173,000.
Other unpaid bills include Chastain Amphitheater at $98,000, Piedmont Park at nearly $88,000, or Fire Station #4 on Edgewood with $67,000 worth of water yet to be paid.
In fact, the list includes 29 separate agencies with the word fire in somewhere their names.
Total unpaid water bills for these firefighters more than $328,000.
The Fulton County Jail is deadbeat number two overall with a total unpaid water bill of more than $1.3 million.
There are at least four other Fulton County bills in the top 100. The unpaid total of those is $268,000.
If you think that’s bad, Grady Hospital has 31 separate water accounts showing unpaid bills of more than $4.5 million.
If this distresses you as you're paying your soon-to-be-higher Atlanta water bill, keep this in mind-- you're in the majority.
There really are more people who pay than don't pay. It's just that some who don't have been collecting your tax dollars and not paying their bills.
Funny: Baltimore (a city with a greater percentage of Black people than Atlanta) is having a similar crisis right now. The Baltimore Business Journal reports:
City Council President Bernard C. “Jack” Young on Monday called for a two-year moratorium on placing liens on properties because of unpaid water or sewer bills.
Young plans to introduce a formal resolution at Monday’s council meeting, he said, followed by an ordinance to enforce the moratorium by March 26.
The move comes in response to a recent city audit that revealed a dysfunctional system of charging businesses and residents for water and sewer usage. Baltimore, according to the audit, has over-charged 38,000 water and sewer customers by more than $4 million. The city so far has failed to correct the inaccurate bills, leaving many customers to either pay more than they could afford or choose not to pay their bills at all, Young said.
“I’ve encountered too many constituents on fixed incomes who routinely have to choose between feeding their families and buying needed medication or paying improperly estimated water bills, which, if left unpaid, have the danger of forcing them into homelessness,” Young said in a statement.No one wants to ask the question, so we will: could these Baltimore residents -odds that we are talking about almost exclusively Black residents are at 100 percent - afford the water rates were correct bills being supplied by the city?
You can't have a community if residents - and the city - decides it doesn't need to pay water bills, deferring higher costs for H20 onto those who actually pay their bills and are productive members of society.
But isn't it wrong to assume - without credible evidence - that it is the Black residents of both Atlanta and Baltimore that aren't paying their water bills? No.
It's not.
Because the one city that keeps on giving provides the answer. Yes, we are talking about Detroit where an estimated 40,000 Black people had their water turned off in the mid-2000s for failing to pay their bills. Extrapolating this out, it seems we can conclude that Stuff Black People Don't Like includes paying utility bills.
The citizens of Detroit - 89 percent Black - have no white residents to transfer the burden of paying a utility to in the form of higher rates for a service they can't provide themselves. Those Black people without water in Detroit suffer - even though the city has relatively low rates - because white people live in the prosperous suburbs they created in escaping the plague of the undertow.
Without a white scapegoat to fit the higher bill, the Detroit Water and Sewage Department (DWSD) has no alternative.
Atlanta and Baltimore do.
Such in life in Black-Run America (BRA). We could have been on Mars, but instead you have to pay for the never-ending sins of a past you had nothing to do with.
Even in something as trivial as utility bills, you can have the burden of those who held to no financial accountability by the state fall on your shoulders. If you are a white Atlanta resident, the next time you get your water bill (or you decide to add up what you have already paid), imagine where that money could be going, were we not living in BRA.
The Black Mecca of America... without a substantial - and growing - white population maintaining the business sector and keeping the city competitive, Atlanta would be nothing more than the Detroit below the Mason Dixon Line.
With Black people spreading out across Metro Atlanta to once exclusively white suburbs (counties), the greatest ecological crisis in America is becoming clear.
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