The new mayor, Paul Winfield, has chosen to stay the course of deceit when it comes to the City of Vicksburg’s utilities. What happened to his request for an independent audit of city funds?

The biggest lie or deceit is that the State of Mississippi regulates the rates of city utilities and revenue collected from utility sales. The State of Mississippi only regulates water for drinking quality and only regulates sewage through the Mississippi Department of Environmental Quality. There is no regulation of rates for municipal-owned utilities or how funds are used. The deceit needs to stop! 

The second lie or deceit perpetrated on the public is that there’s the runaway subsidy being paid to the city’s utilities (water, gas, sewer and garbage funds). Past and present administrations want the residents to believe in their incompetence in that until now, all have failed to include extra money in the rates for maintenance and expansion. And we must also believe that the term maintenance does not include emergency repairs.

John Shorter, veteran City Hall watcher, is president of the Vicksburg Chapter, NAACP.

In government, routine maintenance includes emergency repairs. The truth of the matter is that all the utility funds have maintenance built into their budgets, along with capital expenses and expansion — with the exception of garbage collection services that are contracted out.

I see the latest increase in water and sewer rates (The Vicksburg Post, March 26) as a replacement of the surcharge that was placed on gas bills.

I have copies of the city’s budget reports from the past nine years and they show maintenance revenue along with unexplainable budget reporting inconsistencies. One inconsistency is that the water fund revenue reports are constantly higher than the sewer fund, although the sewer rates are higher. Another inconsistency is that the water fund revenue has stayed in the $4 million range although we have had three major price increases in the years 2000, 2005 and now 2010.

Every increase in utilities is supposedly to pay off debt and eliminate subsidizing. The truth is the administrations are using the utility revenue to repay bonds at $4 million-plus annually for a $17 million general bond issue, a $5 million utility bond issue for water wells and meters and a new $16 million general bond issue.

The $5 million utility bond issue was combined with the other bonds and used as a vehicle for the administration to use the utilities in repaying the bonds when in actuality, a Corps of Engineers’ grant paid for the water wells entirely, making the $5 million bond not needed.

The City of Vicksburg had a $14 million reserve in 1999. The city’s rainy day fund or reserve was accumulated by not doing special projects and stockpiling surplus income from the utilities. In fact, the city would borrow from the sewer fund during the Mayor Robert Walker administration. The deceptive practices of today’s administrations (current and past) make the city’s budget reports unreliable and a form of propaganda.

In 2009, the city board headed by former Mayor Laurence Leyens, stopped publishing the utilities’ revenue amount in the 2009 budget report.  Here in 2010, the city board headed by Mayor Winfield removed all city utility matters from the annual budget report.

In closing, the past and current administrations are the same or possibly worse. The inconsistency in the utilities’ budget reports and lack of facts in reporting the utilities is evidence of this administration and past administrations’ deceit.