Recently, NAHEFFA submitted comments to the MSRB Notice 2017-22 regarding Input on Compliance Support. You can find the submitted comments here.
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We will address this on an Advocacy Committee call, but since there is so much email traffic from authorities and media on the president’s infrastructure proposal, I want to provide some perspective. Circulating all over is a document here of unknown origin and vintage purporting to be the Administration infrastructure proposal. It is chockful of liberalized bond rules—advance refundings for infrastructure related bonds(?), liberalized private use rules, new “reconstruction” bonds, and incentives for public private partnership bondings, among other things.
Some of you are excited because your statutes might allow you to do some of these projects or you could change your statutes. Understandable. We will determine what NAHEFFA’s role is in this effort. We already are engaged with several coalitional efforts. We would want to promote adding bank qualified liberalization and permanency and would want health care and education to be considered as part of the newly minted concept of “vertical” infrastructure. But, a bit of caution here. The distance between cup and lip may be wide. There isn’t much enthusiasm for this among Congressional majority leadership (although there is on a bipartisan basis by rank and file.) House leadership at least will want to pay for some of this largess and friends we will likely be back in the firing line. Perhaps ultimately related, there is talk about technical corrections to a bill considered and enacted in 50 days (did it seem like 500 to you?) Will that happen, will it really be technical, what’s technical anyways, and will it be married up with infrastructure? Meanwhile, Muni Caucus Chair Ill. Rep Hultgren is introducing a bill to bring back advance refundings, keeping hope alive. On the other hand, legislation has been introduced(H.R. 4131,perhaps tied to the Right to Life march this last weekend) by over 100 House Republicans, including friends , to ban tax exempt bonds for abortion clinics, as defined and excluding hospitals. GAO has been asked to study this and two of our authorities’ financing were highlighted. As you will see in Bond Buyer, I tried to deal sensitively with this issue and make the neutral policy point that limitations on non profit status and activities should be dealt with in the definitions in the Code(and state codes) for charities and nonprofits and not through rifle shot provisions in the TEB section. Whatever is a nonprofit should have access to bonding, in other words. Nice style point but probably won’t stop this from being offered this year in the above legislations and other bills that move. Here’s the bill: https://www.congress.gov/bill/115th-congress/house-bill/4131/text? The GAO report request is here. If you have any questions or comments please let Advocacy Chair Martin Walke and me know. I encourage everyone to look at the Financing New Advisories here and herethat the Wisconsin Health and Educational Facilities Authority (WHEFA) released on two recent financings. WHEFA sends releases on all completed financings to various interested parties, including both their Wisconsin and D.C. legislators. The format emphasizes that these are private activity bonds, they quantify savings when applicable and they relate to jobs and the nonprofit mission. A number of authorities, such as the South Carolina Jobs-Economic Development Authority (SCJEDA), do similar releases. If your authority currently does not, it is important to think about something similar as we may well face another attack on PAB’s as part of infrastructure/tax corrections debate/payfors.
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AuthorCharles A. Samuels Archives
December 2019
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