Alabama Home to Nation’s Most Sexually Diseased City; The Problem With Plastic Payments for Jurors
Montgomery, Alabama Joseph Sohm / Shutterstock.com
Also: Maine’s outspoken governor vs. Southern Maine and Albuquerque employees’ New Orleans spending.
Here’s some of what we’ve been reading today …
MONTGOMERY, Alabama: Don’t expect to find this stat on local Chamber of Commerce promotional materials: The Yellowhammer State’s capital city is the most sexually diseased city in the nation with rates of syphilis, gonorrhea and chlamydia at a higher rate than many larger cities, The Associated Press reported. "It's pretty sobering to look at those three as a total," Tom Miller, chief medical officer for the Alabama Department of Public Health, told the AP. [AP]
NORFOLK, Virginia: Local circuit court judges have voiced their concern about juror payments that come in the form of a debit card. As The Virginian-Pilot reports, if jurors don’t use the cards within a short-window of time, their value goes down—in one case cited by the newspaper, one juror’s $30 payment ended up only being $12 due to a $2 monthly inactivity fee charged by the card’s issuing bank. Chief Judge Jack Doyle wrote in a letter about the matter, citing two major concerns, according to the newspaper:
Under Virginia code, if a juror does not collect or cash his reimbursement, the money goes to the state.
"Under your current system any unclaimed money remains with Sun Trust," Doyle's letter states.
Second, current law does not address jurors "being charged any fees in order to collect their payment. Yet this is what apparently is happening," Doyle wrote.
DETROIT, Michigan: While Michigan has some experience with municipalities and school districts in fiscal distress, the state has never had severely distressed county governments. With Wayne County, home to the city of Detroit and many of its suburbs, Michigan is headed into some uncharted waters. “We don’t have a benefit of [knowing] how they work,” bankruptcy attorney and restructuring expert Doug Bernstein told the Detroit Free Press. Under the state’s Public Act 436, local jurisdictions have four options available to them to right their financial ship, including bankruptcy. But a consent agreement, the Free Press reports, is the favored approach to sort out the county’s fiscal problems. [Detroit Free Press]
ALBUQUERQUE, New Mexico: A city-funded trip that sent four employees to New Orleans for Jazz Fest in April has been raising controversy over not just the cost but why reimbursements weren’t posted to the city clerk’s website three months late and not until The Albuquerque Journal asked about them. Each employee’s reimbursements was about $3,400, “making them among the five most expensive trips of the year,” according to the newspaper. [The Albuquerque Journal]
CAPE ELIZABETH, Maine: In a handwritten response to a critical letter from a constituent, Gov. Paul LePage “has declared Mainers from the southern part of the state to be corrupt and exploitative.” [Maine Beacon]
Michael Grass is Executive Editor of Government Executive's Route Fifty.
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