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If you live or work in Vallejo, California; Central Falls, Rhode Island; Harrisburg, Pennsylvania; Boise County, Idaho; or Jefferson County, Alabama, you might have noticed a few alarming changes recently. All of those municipalities have either filed for bankruptcy or plan to do so shortly. If the economy doesn't pick up any steam sometime soon, there could be hundreds more cities and counties filing Chapter 9 - the municipal version of Chapter 11 for individuals and businesses.
Vallejo knows what it's like to go through desperate times-a distinction it shares with similarly-blighted towns and counties around the U.S., including Central Falls, R.I.; Harrisburg, Pa; Boise County, Idaho, and Jefferson County, Ala.
Things started going downhill in Vallejo in the 1990s when a U.S. Navy base that provided a lot of locals with jobs closed shop. As businesses left Vallejo and taxpayers fled, prostitutes and drug-sellers moved in according to recent report by ABC News.
Boise County fell on hard times for a different reason - bad legal luck. A jury ruled in 2010 that the county had wrongly prohibited a developer from building a teen treatment center. The developer won a $4 million judgment, which the county just doesn't have the money to pay.
In Harrisburg, PA residents got screwed through a deal to build a waste-to-energy incinerator whose renovation caused the town to go $310 million into debt. That's five times as much money as the city has in its general fund, according to the Stateline newspaper.
In Alabama's Jefferson County, home of the state capitol of Birmingham, the county has been suffering for three years from the implosion of a sewer bond refinancing.
As of mid-August, county officials were trying to decide whether to file the largest municipal bankruptcy in U.S. history or to continue negotiating with its creditors. Obviously there's no money for things like fixing dangerously neglected bridges in Jefferson County. As a result, local school busses must go around them.
And that puts the county even deeper in the hole because the extra mileage, some 1,722 miles in detours, costs the county $2.5 million a year, reports Bloomberg News.
In Central Falls, Rhode Island, the economy started falling apart all the way back in the 1970s, when local textile makers began moving plants overseas. Some 1,400 jobs ultimately were lost, causing a drastic reduction in tax revenues according to the National Council of Textile Organizations.
Crime in Central Falls increased to the point that the city was crowned the Cocaine Capital of New England by Rolling Stone magazine in 1986.
To try and avoid bankruptcy, Central Falls is now is trying to take back from its police and firemen some $2.5 million in promised pension benefits. (See page 9 of the September 2011 issue of APB for a photo regarding this.)
The point of all this is that crime goes through the roof when a city can't pay its bills.
In Vallejo residents say the area has become overrun by crime and prostitution in the wake of budget cuts that have reduced the city's police force by roughly 50 percent.
Local resident Kathy Beistel, 48, told ABC News the city's problems are right on her doorstep.
The final straw for her, she said was "a pimp fight in front of my house." When she called police to report the incident, she was told there weren't enough officers left to handle such problems.
"We used to have 158 officers," Vallejo police Chief Robert Nichelini told ABC. "We have 90 now."
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