So goes the headline in today’s ongoing saga of Southeastern Public Service Authority, better known as SPSA. The Virginia Pilot reports that the troubled agency received a scathing letter from Sheryl Bailey, executive director of the Virginia Resources Authority, which loaned SPSA $129 million.
SPSA “blatantly and recklessly misrepresented” its financial condition…
[…]
The VRA, based in Richmond, will dispatch an accounting team “to sort out and get a handle on SPSA’s true financial status,” the executive director, Sheryl D. Bailey, wrote in her letter to SPSA’s executive director, Bucky Taylor.
[…]
In her letter, Bailey said she and her staff were most distressed by three loans and lines of credit from Wachovia Bank to SPSA, worth a combined $29 million.
Two lines of credit were omitted from a SPSA debt spreadsheet during a sit-down meeting with VRA officials last month, and a repayment schedule showed a big loan being repaid slowly between 2012 and 2017.
However, VRA staff later discovered papers that showed how $12.1 million would be paid back in one lump sum in 2011.
In addition, SPSA initially said that little money had been used from a $13.2 million line of credit. But in late January, VRA officials learned that almost half was withdrawn or obligated, and they were stunned to read newspaper articles describing how SPSA had wanted to use the remaining $7 million to pay its operational expenses to keep the agency afloat.
Seems the Hampton Roads cities that pony up to fund SPSA aren’t the only ones in the dark about what is going on over there.
I hope that Bailey’s auditors are able to untangle the mess and issue a public report on it.
Is it time for SPSA to be dismantled and let someone else have a go at this?
VIVIAN J. PAIGE | All Politics is Local 
There needs to be a Grand Jury investigation into the conduct of the Board of Directors of SPSA. Then prosecution and jail time for these criminals. This goes beyond scandal. All of the people who whine about “regional government” had better take action, this SPSA mess is proving beyond a shadow of a doubt that “regional government” does not work. These people who run SPSA need to go to jail.
SPSA has been a mess for a lot longer then the public was able to see.
Melody has it right, and I’m with you on this, Vivian.
I think SPSA’s beyond saving.
What? The government screwed up AGAIN? I am shocked, SHOCKED, I say.
Can you tell me again why you want the government to run the economy?
SPSA is not the government, Mouse.
From the SPSA website: “Initial funding was provided by $3,000,000 of bond anticipation notes secured by four local communities.”
Sounds like the government to me.
And later: “Funding was provided by bond issues of $26 million and $107.8 million in 1984 and $20 million in 1985.”
I wonder who secured those bonds.
Call it the government, or a Frankenstein’s monster created by the government, it makes no difference. Does it make a difference that Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac were government creations, and not the government? The government screwed up in the creation and the oversight. We’re left with the mess, and the government has deniability.
SPSA is very much “the government”, only they operate in defiance of the Freedom of Information Act, and have now committed a felony by lying on applications for loans. THIS IS THE EPITOME OF REGIONAL GOVERNMENT IN HAMPTON ROADS.
HRT = regional government run amok
SPSA = out of control spending and now lying
VPA = more “regional government gone bad!
There are no good examples of “regional government”. Its all bad, its all out of control and it all needs to be abolished.