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...
Ciccarone
Tollroads Show Strongest Growth in Total Revenue Growth
Tollroads Edge Hospitals for the Municipal Bond Credit Sector Revenue Honors Tollroad and Hospital Sectors easily led all other municipal bond credit sectors when it came to annual total revenue growth over the recent five year period spanning 2012 through 2017....
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...
Municipal Finance: The Financial Condition of U.S. States
General Fund Balance for Majority of U.S. States Fiscal Year 2016 Continue on a Positive Path by Richard Ciccarone As measured on a median basis, state total general fund balances in relation to expenditures recorded their best end of year operating position since the...
Housing Values Reverse Course – Cities Mix of Winners and Losers
Richard Ciccarone presents data and notes on trends in housing values Owner occupied housing values benefited from an uptick in 2015, bucking the trend of four years of successive declines nationally. By no means ubiquitous, some...
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...
Featured Conference: Brookings/Brandeis/Washington University 5th Annual Municipal Finance Conference
On July 12, 2016, the Hutchins Center on Fiscal and Monetary Policy at Brookings Institution, the Rosenberg Institute of Global Finance at Brandeis International Business School, and Olin Business School at Washington University St. Louis are teaming together to...
Change Doesn’t Come Easy for Municipal Bond Audit Timing
by Richard A. Ciccarone Despite serious jawboning by market participants and a spotlight on a spate of municipal credit problems since 2010, Merritt Research Services' latest and most expansive study to date, using financial reports from 2014, continues to show that...
Assessing the Credit Quality of America’s Cities – Part Four: FY 2014 Financial Condition
The most basic sign that a government is living within its means is that it balances its books at the end of the year. Traditionally, most city officials, experts, and observers of state and local government focus primarily on the general fund, usually a government's...
Assessing the Credit Quality of America’s Cities – Part Two: The Achilles Heel to the Fiscal Condition of Cities – Public Pensions
In the second part of our series on city credit quality, the spotlight shifts to the Achilles heel for many cities: public pensions. by Richard A. Ciccarone Governmental credit quality is a byproduct of both the underlying economy and the cumulative...