is a brightline station right for stuart
Financial Black Hole
It's crucial to identify which commissioners are prudent with public funds and which are willing to invest your hard-earned tax dollars in one of the riskiest, unproven business models today. Let's not allow reckless decisions to jeopardize our financial stability. Supporting a company that is unlikely to repay its loans is a financial risk and a mismanagement of public funds. To illustrate this, consider Brightline's refinanced $5.35 billion debt with interest rates up to 12%; I used a 7% interest rate over 30 years. The monthly payments alone are $35,593,683, or annually, $427,124,200 to service the debt! That means over 30 years, the total cost of that debt would exceed $11.5 billion, with over half of that amount going toward interest payments. Brightline's ridership for the first half of this year was 1,401,077 at an average ticket price of $55. Brightline is on track to bring in $189,600,000 of ticket & ancillary revenue for 2024. To reiterate, Brightline needs around $427,000,000 annually to service its debt. Plus, Brightline still needs to cover its operational & maintenance expenses, and let's remember Brightline has never turned a profit and lost $116,000,000 in the first quarter of this year alone! Given these numbers, it's hard to fathom whether Brightline will ever generate the revenue required to meet these obligations. Instead, this project will likely become a perpetual drain on public resources, diverting funds from essential services such as healthcare, education, and infrastructure. Public officials must act in the best interest of their constituents, and funneling millions of taxpayer dollars into a venture with seemingly no realistic chance of success violates that trust. I urge commissioners to prioritize responsible, transparent use of public funds, as Commissioners Collins, Giobbi, and Reed have done. The people deserve better than to watch their money disappear into a financial black hole.
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