By Richard A. Ciccarone, President & CEO of Merritt Research Services, LLC and Co-Owner of MUNINET, LLC The Top 21% of Cities With High Pension Funding Levels Deserve Attention and Usually Praise With so much well-deserved negative attention focused on cities...
Municipal Finance & Fiscal Distress
Worried About Public Pensions? Counties Often Have Lower Burdens
Counties Often Underappreciated Despite Generally Improving Fund Balances and Lower Debt and Pension Liabilities By Richard A. Ciccarone County governments are generally a good place to start your search for governments with positive financial conditions as well as...
Paying for Yesterday’s Public Services with Tomorrow’s Funds – Risking City Fiscal Stress
Are Fixed Costs Squeezing Out State and Local Governments' Ability to Deliver Public Services? In the back of every analyst’s mind, whenever they assess public pension risk and the potential for fiscal stress, is the question of whether or not the annual cost to pay...
Aging Infrastructure Is a Problem, From Any Point of View
Accounting Approach Shows Aging Infrastructure Kicks Additional Costs to the Future Validating the Aging Infrastructure Problem from the Engineer’s Point of View There are few public-minded cities and governmental officials that are unaware of America’s recent habit...
Fiscal Contagion: When Distressed Municipalities Put States and Local Clusters at Risk
by Richard A. Ciccarone When a municipal government suffers severe fiscal problems, be it a city, county, school district, utility district, or any other special purpose government, those problems have a tendency to impact or be shared by other governments. Bond...
This May Be One “Discount” That’s not So Appealing
More on 2015 City Pension Funds: This is Part II in Richard Ciccarone's look at city pension funds in 2015 and the future landscape. Part I can be found here. Earlier this month, MuniNet reported that most city pension plan funding ratios took a positive bounce based...
The Myth That Bankruptcy Is the Only Option for Distressed States and Cities – Alternatives to Chapter 9
By James Spiotto Myth: State and local governments only recourse to financial distress is to file bankruptcy or to stop making debt payments to bondholders. Reality: States do not presently have a bankruptcy alternative and do not seem to desire one. State and local...