[homieg33]

In my regular smallish suburban city I have a sidewalk stamped from 1922. However, they just redid all the roads, sewer, and certain side walks (bad sections). They are now running municipal fiber tubes throughout the whole sprawling city. As far as I can tell the city is still operated as a self-financing entity and has been since the 1800’s. Is this a facade or just an anomaly?

[Moomoomoo309]

In some of their other material, they go over this. Many of the bigger projects (not something like the two examples you picked, more like redoing intersections, making new roads, fixing highways, etc.) are financed by the state and federal governments, so they end up being able to keep their budget afloat as long as they get pulled up occasionally by the state/feds. This is still bad, mind you, which is why they're not wrong per se.