Things were looking bleak for Oakland last month after a Kentucky bankruptcy judge ruled that Oakland interfered with a coal developer’s efforts to build an export terminal, forcing them into insolvency.
The judgment put Oakland on the hook for potentially hundreds of millions of dollars in damages – money the cash-strapped city would have virtually no way of covering without asking voters to approve new bond measures. It also handed a major victory to the coal company, Insight Terminal Solutions. On Monday, the New York Times published a gloomy article speculating that Oakland was headed toward bankruptcy.
But the city won a reprieve on Friday after a federal district judge who reviewed the case found that the…