Downtown, at the courthouse, the line for car license tags snakes down a corridor. The county has shut its satellite courthouses, so everything now gets done here. Every department is short-staffed. The sheriff, Mike Hale, can’t afford to pay overtime. There is also outrage that the county paid Mr. Young, the court-ordered receiver, a little more than $1 million for 14 months’ work.

The county’s road crews are patching only big potholes; resurfacing can wait. The tax collector has laid off four agents, at a savings of $180,000. But the math of bankruptcy doesn’t always work well. Last year, those four agents collected $2.7 million from delinquent taxpayers, so it’s possible the county is losing money in this arrangement.

Down U.S. 11 from Birmingham is the city of Bessemer, where the second county jail, refurbished a few years ago at a cost of $11 million, sits empty and unused. The county can’t afford to pay for the guards. At the county jail in Birmingham, meanwhile, a 20-year-old program under which certain inmates were released pending trial, provided they wore electronic monitors and underwent drug tests, has been cut. That saved $2 million, but now the jail is overcrowded.

David Carrington, the president of the Jefferson County Commission, has floated the idea of freeing several hundred inmates. “We can’t be in contempt of court,” Mr. Carrington said.

Sheriff Hale refuses to consider that. The county, he said, has a duty to protect its citizens.

Here and there, new projects have sprouted up as if nothing has happened. The Logan family just broke ground on a $64 million ballpark for the Birmingham Barons, the minor league baseball team. Over in Hoover, a bedroom community that stretches over parts of Jefferson and Shelby counties, the police department bought 30 new Chevy Tahoes last year and sold a few of its old ones to Sheriff Hale.

And yet David Sher, a local businessman, said everyone wonders how the county will ever get out of this financial mess.

“People are desperate to think of anything they can to get the money,” he said.

The federal bankruptcy judge overseeing the case, Thomas B. Bennett, has already rendered a sobering appraisal. It is “highly unlikely,” he wrote in a decision in January, that “what was loaned can ever be repaid.”