Very little of that makes sense. Firstly, yes, the Governor did voice opposition to the idea of using public money to bailout a private institution. The executive branch routinely denied BSC's requests/pleas for State money from the various funds the State has set up to support its own educational institutions in the event of an emergency, as they would be expected to do. However, the Governor did sign the bill once passed by both the House and Senate, so there is nothing you can say about her level of cooperation in this effort. There's certainly no reason to say she signed it but directed others to stand in BSC's path thereafter unless you're just trying to cope with disappointment. If BSC is so conservative (which I disagree with, but that's not important here), I don't understand their shock that the conservative government of a conservative State is not inclined to risk giving (because that's what it would be after bankruptcy) money to a failing school, and a private one at that. It is against the very tenets of fiscal conservatism. Finally, the Governor does not appoint the Treasurer - that is a State-wide elected office. Kay Ivey is done after this term, yes, but the Treasurer is not. He is on his third term now and the only restriction I am aware of is he cannot have more than two consecutive terms, which he has not. I am not aware of any upper age restrictions on that office either.

We can complain about how long it takes to implement a program which never existed prior to last year, but we would look stupid in doing so. It's part of the bargain for relying on the State for something you're supposed to be able to do yourselves. I certainly can't fault a Constitutional Officer for attempting to be as thorough as possible when it comes to lending out money that BSC impliedly says they can't get from their alumni or borrow from a bank, or finding out whether the State would actually get any of the assets put up as collateral. Imagine if he issued the loan, the school later defaulted, and when the collateralized assets were sold all that money went to the other banks and the state got left with nothing because the Treasurer wasn't thorough enough...People in government go to jail for things like that.

As for the complaints about timing, BSC did that to themselves. They are the ones that described the loan program as their last resort. "When" they found out they were denied has no bearing on what their fate was going to be after denial...they are the ones who are apparently unable to borrow anything else from ServisFirst. And they are the ones whose education program is one of the top ten that "leads to graduate school", which is another way of saying "leads to more tuition payments, more student debt and less disposable income for our alumni to donate back to us in the short term". I also don't get what you mean about the Treasurer's office not contacting the school but placed a letter of denial in the mail...that is just contradictory.

Quote from: jknezek on March 26, 2024, 04:18:49 PMAnd so the slow train wreck finally reaches it's end. Alabama is a very interesting place to live. I've never known somewhere so determined to cut off it's own nose to spite it's face. Will be interesting to see what happens to that property. It's an incredible waste if it is left to rot.

What would it take to lure $100 million of economic activity a year? A lot more than a $30 million loan. But when your school system is in the bottom 5 of the country, your population is poverty stricken, you believe anything the government touches is evil, and anywhere in the state that votes blue should be cut off... this is what you get. Oh, also an inability to apply the phrase "Roll Tide" or "War Eagle" doesn't help.

But go Montgomery Whitewater!

An alternative interpretation of the last several years, even going back to 2007-10 when I was on the first 4 teams, is that BSC did this to themselves. This post drips of the kind of elitist entitlement coursing through BSC that turns many off. The Treasurer's recent Op-Ed laid this out plainly and many of the things he cited were things I witnessed first-hand. Alabama Treasurer statement
When he denied BSC's loan application, BSC decided to make a bunch of back-handed comments and personal attacks about the Treasurer in the local media despite the fact the loan program statute clearly indicated the Treasurer is the one person in Alabama that BSC needed to have a good relationship with. It wasn't even possible the Treasurer, who has 50+ years of banking and finance experience, was properly exercising the judgment entrusted to him by the statute and the 5 million residents of Alabama before doling out public money to a private school. No, it BSC's mind, it must be that the Treasurer is acting in an arbitrary, capricious, mean-spirited and illegal manner...It can't possibly be anything else. This is the tone they took when suing to attempt to force the Treasurer into doing his job the way BSC wanted it done. The lawsuit was filed and lost in a total of 8 days because BSC's case had absolutely no merit at all, and there was no appeal.

I hate BSC is closing, and I hate the football program I helped build is being wiped away. When I first came to the school, we had no locker room and no stadium, just drawings of what it they would look like. We practiced on the intramural fields and kept our pads in the common areas of the dorms. We played games in four different stadiums around town before ours opened at the end of year 2. Of the 110 freshmen on the first team, only 17 played all four years and graduated. I will miss my school dearly, but none of that excuses the ungraceful, flailing, childish temper-tantrums unleashed by BSC's leadership, who I expect to know better.