Earth to Maglev Inc.: You're wasting everybody's time and money -- mostly taxpayers' -- by seeking to reorganize "your" debts under Chapter 11 of the U.S. Bankruptcy Code. For if ever there were a case for a Chapter 7 filing -- liquidation -- this is it.
The company, based in McKeesport, long has dreamed of building a high-speed, magnetic-levitation train that would run 54 miles between Pittsburgh International Airport and Greensburg. It would not ride on steel wheels and rails but on a "cushion" of magnetic energy.
But this thing -- and "thing" is the most charitable descriptive we can rustle up -- has had "BOONDOGGLE" stamped all over it since first being proposed a decade ago.
There's the current $5.2 billion price tag, certain to wildly escalate. "Cost-benefit"⢠Maglev does a disservice to the concept. While taxpayers already have been pickpocketed for millions of dollars in preliminary work, the federal government flatly rejected a request for $2.3 billion to build the first leg of the route from the airport to downtown Pittsburgh.
Equally telling is Maglev Inc.'s balance sheet -- $50,000 or less in assets, about $600,000 in liabilities -- quite meager sums for such a grandiose project. It can't secure any lines of credit. And in typical fashion, it blames a lack of timely government funding for its fiscal woes.
Talk about bankrupt. If this were such a fantastic idea, where were the private investors?
If Maglev Inc. won't convert its Chapter 11 filing to Chapter 7, the court should do so.
