Interest rates tend to be lower at the beginning of the calendar year, and business is customarily slow for lenders at the start of the year as well. Those two trends make January a great time to review your outstanding debt and ask your friendly neighborhood bankers...

We now have the official calendar for meetings of the Local Government Commission for 2015. We thought a table might be handy.

Along with the meeting dates, this table shows the dates 28 days prior to the meeting, because generally the Commission staff wants a fairly complete application package in hand by then. We’ve also noted the dates 45 days prior to the meeting dates, because that’s the deadline for sending in your advance notice to the General Assembly’s Joint Committee on Local Government (see this post for more information on that requirement).

We are taking a different approach today at the blog and checking in with the Town of Hillsborough, still the only local government to date who has used Special Assessment Revenue Bonds as part of the new authority authorized in 2008 (and set to expire in 2015). Often, when someone is a “first adopter,” they end up having to create new processes to implement a program, rather than working from a path someone else has laid. This blog post will highlight the Town of Hillsborough’s work with the Waterstone Development District to see how things are going a year after the bonds were issued. We also engaged in some amateur photograph and videography of the development that we hope you enjoy as well.

Lawyers often ask their local government clients to waive conflicts of interest. Here are some suggested rules for how a local government should handle conflict waiver requests from its outside lawyers:

Standard & Poor’s Ratings Services recently sent a letter to the local governments for which it maintains ratings – apparently that’s about 20,000 issuers across the United States. In the letter, S&P tells issuers they need to send to S&P documents from any “private debt” that the issuers enter into, and that these documents need to go to S&P promptly following the closing of the private debt. Otherwise, S&P may suspend or withdraw the issuer’s rating. By “private debt,” S&P means any bank placements or other borrowings that do not go through the ratings process.

Back in February, I posted this article on why I think the LGC’s proposed debt maturity guidelines are unfair as applied to refundings of long-term USDA debt. In March, the LGC staff said it would assemble a small stakeholders group to work through the proposed guidelines. Last week, I was told that the staff hoped to convene the stakeholders group some time after July 1.

Every lawyer probably has his or her own list. Let me mention three that affect the North Carolina local government and public finance practice.