Jesse of Free UTOPIA offered an in-depth explanation of UTOPIA's financial situation and some of the financial difficulties they are facing in mid-2009.

A snippet:

I had the opportunity to go down to UTOPIA’s office today to get updated on what’s going on down there. I walked away with a much better feel of what’s going on and a better understanding of what has caused the situation with the bonds. They also comitted to do a better job of keeping me up to speed on what’s happening. Here’s the lowdown on why the bonds are being called.

The bond situation they are in is complex, ugly, and not at all their fault. UTOPIA was required by the financing bank to use variable rate bonds instead of fixed rate bonds. Variable rate bonds obviously create a lot of issues with financial planning since you can end up with drastic and sudden rate changes. As a hedge against this, UTOPIA opted to create sort of a hedge against this volatility using a second type of bond. (If I screw up this explanation, someone send Kirt Sudweeks in to fix my explanation.)

The gist of it is that UTOPIA makes payments on a bond at a fixed 5.65% in exchange for receiving revenues on a type of variable-rate bond that has, historically, been withing 14 basis points (0.14%) of the type of bond they are using for financing. Because the bonds paid to them have historically been about the same as the bonds they are paying, it should, in theory, ensure that they pay no more than 5.65% on the outstanding debt.