Municipal News & Jobs

School leaders in Dodge City USD 443 were flummoxed. For years, the district had maintained respectable graduation rates — great, even, for a district with high rates of at-risk and low-income students. With graduation percentages in the mid to upper 80s, Dodge City USD 443 most years trailed the average statewide graduation rate, but not by much. What didn’t make sense, though, at least not initially, was the dismal rate at which students went on to pursue any kind of education or training after high school, a measure called post-secondary effectiveness that the Kansas State Department of Education started tracking in 2015. In Dodge City, only about 1 in 5 students who entered Dodge City High School as freshman enrolled in any kind of post-high school education, per a five-year average of the first half of the 2010s. … Why weren’t students doing anything else after graduating high school? School leaders had a few ideas, and after Superintendent Fred Dierksen arrived to the district six years ago, Dodge City USD 443 began turning its rates around, nearly doubling its post-secondary success rate to 40.4% in the latest data collection. It’s a roadmap to success that other Kansas school districts should look at, Education Commissioner Randy Watson previously told the Kansas State Board of Education. Here’s how the district made it happen.
Read more: Salina Journal

The year 2022 marked a truly historic bust for the U.S. bond market. The question now is whether 2023 will produce any kind of meaningful rebound. … Investors were forced to repeatedly lift their expectations for how high the Federal Reserve would raise short-term interest rates to combat the worst inflation in decades. The sharp drop in bond prices was in many ways the dominant force in financial markets, driving borrowing costs higher and contributing to double-digit losses for stocks. Despite bonds’ 2022 drubbing and the criticism that the Fed has come under for being slow to act on inflation, investors, if anything, have been consistently more optimistic than the central bank. That continues today, with investors forecasting lower interest rates than the Fed—a divide that some analysts and traders say poses a significant risk of extending last year’s rout.
Source: Wall Street Journal

Big banks are predicting that an economic downturn is fast approaching. More than two-thirds of the economists at 23 large financial institutions that do business directly with the Federal Reserve are betting the U.S. will have a recession in 2023. Two others are predicting a recession in 2024. The firms… cite a number of red flags: Americans are spending down their pandemic savings. The housing market is in decline, and banks are tightening their lending standards. … The main culprit is the Federal Reserve, economists said, which has been raising rates for months to try to slow the economy and curb inflation. Though inflation has eased recently, it is still much higher than the Fed’s desired target. The Fed raised rates seven times in 2022, pushing its benchmark from a range of 0% to 0.25% to the current 4.25% to 4.50%, a 15-year high. Officials signaled in December that they plan to keep raising rates to between 5% and 5.5% in 2023. Most of the economists surveyed by The Wall Street Journal expect the higher rates will push the unemployment level from November’s 3.7% to above 5%—still low by historical standards, but that increase would mean that millions of Americans would lose their jobs.
Source: Wall Street Journal

The interest rate table above illustrates recent changes in a sample of MBIS “investment grade” yields. Every issuer’s credit is different. For rates that may be applicable to your municipality, contact our Municipal Bond Advisors, Larry Kleeman, Beth Warren and Henry Schmidt.

The majority of Lawrence residents who responded to a city survey about sidewalk repair said the city should take full financial responsibility for repairs, adding more weight to discussions about potential changes to the city’s current cost-share program. The Lawrence City Commission will receive the survey results as part of its meeting Tuesday. The city put out the survey in October to ask residents to weigh in on whether changes should be made to the city’s sidewalk repair program. In addition to asking about funding, the survey asked several other questions about the format of the program.
Source: LJWorld

Syllabus: An initiative petition is effective when it substantially complies with all relevant statutory safeguards. This means that petitioners must comply with the essential matters necessary to assure every reasonable objective of the statutes has been met. An initiative petition can only be used to advance policies that are legislative in nature, not for policies that are predominantly executive or administrative. Ordinances tend to be administrative in nature when they require particularized knowledge in matters of city operations, associated space requirements, public safety, and regulatory issues, as well as an intimate appreciation of the city’s fiscal affairs.
Source: Kansas Court of Appeals

The interest rate table above illustrates recent changes in a sample of MBIS “investment grade” yields. Every issuer’s credit is different. For rates that may be applicable to your municipality, contact our Municipal Bond Advisors, Larry Kleeman, Beth Warren and Henry Schmidt.

If you’re an Emporian, you already know the city has staked its claim to this wildly popular sport. Disc golf has manifested in many ways in Emporia/Lyon County. The city has hosted the disc golf world championships, boasts the largest disc golf retail store in the world, offers several disc golf courses and the Emporia State University men’s team is ranked No. 1 in the nation. Enough proof? UDisc, a disc golf resource website, ranked Emporia as the top disc golf small town in the country. “A lot of people refer to Emporia as the disc golf capital of the world, the Mecca,” said Dynamic Discs founder Jeremy Rusco. Lelan Dains, the director of Visit Emporia. echoed Rusco’s words. “You know, we seem to have reached the pinnacle of the sport and are widely recognized as the disc golf capital, certainly in the US,” Dains added.
Source: Emporia Gazette

The City of Lawrence is set to begin a yearlong pilot program that will make city buses free to ride in 2023. All Lawrence Transit services will be free beginning Monday, Jan. 2, including the city’s regular fixed-route bus service, paratransit service, the Night Line and the new “microtransit” service, which will operate on Sundays, according to a city news release. The Fare Free Pilot Program is financially supported by increased federal transit funding. The program will be re-evaluated in Fall 2023 to determine the feasibility of extending the pilot. Microtransit, which will operate on Sundays when regular routes do not run, will operate similar to on-demand ride-sharing services such as Uber and Lyft, but utilize transit vehicles.
Source: LJWorld

The interest rate table above illustrates recent changes in a sample of MBIS “investment grade” yields. Every issuer’s credit is different. For rates that may be applicable to your municipality, contact our Municipal Bond Advisors, Larry Kleeman, Beth Warren and Henry Schmidt.

The interest rate table above illustrates recent changes in a sample of MBIS “investment grade” yields. Every issuer’s credit is different. For rates that may be applicable to your municipality, contact our Municipal Bond Advisors, Larry Kleeman, Beth Warren and Henry Schmidt.