David McElroy

Every time there’s a wild binge of some sort, there comes a day of reckoning. For Americans, we might be seeing the first early warnings that it’s not far away.

In front of the Jefferson County Courthouse in Birmingham this morning, a couple dozen protesters picketed against proposed sewer rate increases in the county where I live. Rates have skyrocketed over the past decade because of billions of dollars that the county borrowed for the sewer system. Much of the money was lost to waste and fraud. Several politicians and contractors went to prison for their part in the massive fraud.

Explaining the full story would bore you silly, but it involves greedy local politicians, greedy contractors and slick NYC bankers who sold the county on making complicated and dangerous financial transactions that county officials didn’t really understand. (This PDF is the best summary I can find of how the debt accumulated.)

The county owes billions to the banks and is threatening to file a bankruptcy which would make the one Orange County, Calif., filed in 1994 pale in comparison. County sewer customers are angry about any proposal which would keep increasing their bills in order to give more and more money to the banks, so politicians are willing to pull the bankruptcy switch.

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In the wake of the story about Ronnie Bryant getting some national attention, Larry Downes of Indianapolis radio station WIBC interviewed me last Thursday. Listening to it reminds me of why I went into print journalism instead of broadcast. As talk radio host Ian Punnett frequently says, I have the face for radio and the voice for print.

In popular mythology, police officers and firefighters are the heroes of society. One of the staples of journalism is the brave cop or firefighter who risks his life for others. Is it still true?

These days, it seems as though departmental “policies and procedures” in some places are conspiring to make it clear that the public’s safety is purely secondary to the job.

On Memorial Day, a suicidal man walked into San Francisco Bay and stood neck-deep for about an hour while about 75 people watched. Police and firefighters were called, but they refused to help when they saw the situation. The man took himself under the water and died while these “public safety” employees watched.

Police later said they didn’t know whether the man might be dangerous. Firefighters blamed budget cuts for the department not having proper training to go into the water to rescue the man. When asked whether he would go into the water to save a drowning child, the fire chief responded this way:

“Well, if I was off duty, I would know what I would do, but I think you’re asking me my on-duty response, and I would have to stay within our policies and procedures, because that’s what’s required by our department to do.”

This story is recounted by Steven Greenhut in the summer edition of City Journal, who makes the case that public safety is being endangered by state employee unionism. He argues that these “first responders” are being turned into the equivalent of bureaucrats. Ultimately, the state cares about the state and those who serve it, not about you.