The City’s 17-Year-Old Bad Debt Problem
Tacoma voters will decide at the upcoming spring election whether to honor $48,000 in outlawed street improvement warrants that have accrued triple their value in interest.
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The people will get a chance at the coming spring election to say whether or not they want to pay up a lot of bad debts. There are $48,000 of old outlawed warrants on the books scattered around in the hands of various people. They have been drawing interest for 17 years, so the bill is about three times that amount now. The warrants were issued to pay street assessments that were not liquidated by the property owners and when the money did not come in on the assessments there was nothing to pay the warrants. Later the whole thing became outlawed. Some people think the credit of the city is affected by the old repudiated warrants and an ordinance is being prepared under sanction of Chairman Wilkeson of the finance committee today, to submit the question of taking up the warrants to the vote at the election.
“Some people think the credit of the city is affected by the old repudiated warrants.”
Municipal debt and the question of how a city balances its books—and whose interest that debt serves—remains a central tension in Tacoma politics. Like the 1909 struggle over these street assessment warrants, modern budget fights often pit the city's credit rating against the burden placed on taxpayers.
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