I am happy to congratulate the Ries family from Posey County for receiving the Hoosier Homestead Award. The awards were presented by Lt. Gov. Sue Ellspermann and Agriculture Director Gina Sheets at the Indiana State Fair this week.

Hoosier agriculture is the backbone of our state. Family farms bring not only economic stability to Indiana, but also a tradition and sense of what makes a community great. I want to applaud the Ries farm for their accomplishment and wish them the best of luck in continuing to represent our community’s wonderful agriculture heritage.

The Hoosier Homestead Award Program recognizes families with farms that have been owned by the same family for 100 years or more. Fifty-four Centennial awards were given for 100 years of ownership, 15 Sesquicentennial awards recognized 150 years and three Bicentennial awards for operating at least 200 years in the Hoosier state.

The Ries Farm, located in Mount Vernon, Ind., began in 1862. The Ries farm received the Sesquicentennial award.

The program began in 1976 to acknowledge the contributions these families have made to Indiana agriculture. More than 5,000 farms have been recognized since the program was established .

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The following email was sent out by the Chamber of Commerce this morning to encourage supporters of the $37.5 Million gift to the hotel developer to show up in force at Monday night’s Citty Council meeting.

****CALL TO ACTION****

We have been asked to attend Monday night’s City Council Meeting in support of the downtown hotel project. The project has been approved by the Redevelopment Commission and will be brought before the city council for the first reading Monday night. This will put the project in line to be voted upon at the September 9th meeting and there is hope to have ground broken by late 2013.

The meeting will begin at 5:30 PM , this Monday, August 12, in the City Council chambers of the Civic Center.

We hope you can attend this meeting. Please let me know if you can attend by emailing me at jgroenert@ccswin.com

There will also be public meetings scheduled throughout the city over the coming few weeks. That schedule is below:

Tuesday, August 13 6:00 PM

Red Bank Library

120 S. Red Bank Road, 47712

Wednesday, August 14 6:00 PM

McCullough Library

5115 Washington Avenue, 47715

Saturday, August 17 1:00 PM

Concordia Lutheran Church

2451 Stringtown Road, 47711

Monday, August 19 6:00 PM

Dexter Elementary School

917 S. Dexter Ave, 47714

Wednesday, August 21 10:00 AM

Central Library, Browning Room B

200 SE M.L. King Blvd, 47708

Wednesday, August 21 6:00 PM

North Park Library

960 Koehler Drive 47711

Justin Groenert | Director of Government Relations & Public Policy
The Chamber of Commerce of Southwest Indiana
318 Main Street, Suite 401 | Evansville, IN 47708
O: (812) 421-5888 | C: (812) 589-1650

By Mary Williams

The Detroit Effect has rippled all the way to Wall Street.

Two weeks after Detroit declared bankruptcy, cities, counties and other local governments in Michigan are getting a cold shoulder in the municipal bond market.

The judgment has been swift and brutal. Borrowing costs are up around the state, in some cases drastically. On Thursday, Saginaw County became the latest casualty when it said it was delaying a $60 million bond sale planned for Friday. It had hoped to put the proceeds into its pension fund.

It was the third postponed bond sale in Michigan since Detroit dropped its bombshell on July 18. Earlier this week, the city of Battle Creek said it would postpone a $16 million deal scheduled for August because of concerns that investors would demand interest rates that were too high. And the previous week, Genesee County withdrew a $54 million bond sale from the market for the same reason.

Detroit’s bankruptcy, the largest ever by a municipality, has raised fundamental concerns about the safety and security of municipal bonds, certainly in Michigan but potentially elsewhere in the country, too. The municipal bond market appears to be sending Michigan’s cities a message that no matter how well rated they are, they are going to have to postpone their plans and projects or pay more for them.

When Jefferson County, Ala., declared bankruptcy in 2011, there were warnings it had tainted the credit of all other municipalities in the state, but the expected fallout never materialized. After Orange County, Calif., came through its bankruptcy in the 1990s, its borrowing costs actually fell. But Michigan appears to have something new — a bankruptcy that makes it harder for others in the state to borrow.

Detroit’s state-appointed emergency manager, Kevyn Orr, has proposed imposing deep cuts on some bondholders — treating them the same, in effect, as retired Detroit workers who have been receiving city-paid health insurance that will now end. Mr. Orr’s bankruptcy plan would put them all at the back of the line for whatever money is available, as unsecured creditors.

And because the city’s bankruptcy filing was approved by the governor, Rick Snyder, it is seen as the best distillation of how Michigan will treat certain bondholders in times of trouble.

Putting a city’s “full faith, credit and taxing power” behind a bond no longer means what it did in the past, anywhere in the state, critics say. The governor and Mr. Orr have said they are not concerned about the effect of the bankruptcy plan on the municipal bond market as a whole. But other participants find their treatment of indebtedness profoundly disturbing, and their anxiety has spilled over to other Michigan municipalities.

“A lot of the people I talk to are investors who are just very angry about this,” said Matt Fabian, a managing director at Municipal Market Advisors. “Bonds are so cheap everywhere across the whole market, there’s no reason to put anyone in Michigan bonds right now.”

Sara Wurfel, a spokeswoman for Governor Snyder, acknowledged the concerns, but said they were overblown. She called Detroit’s financial breakdown “an incredibly unique situation,” and said the bond rating agencies would continue to rate Michigan’s other municipalities individually, each on its own strengths and weaknesses no matter what went on in Detroit.

“Michigan is home to hundreds of local communities across our state, rated by the credit agencies,” she said. According to a recent analysis by Standard & Poor’s, she said, “only two of those aren’t investment grade. There continue to be an abundance of sound, smart investments to make in Michigan and our local communities. Michigan’s fiscal house is in order and sound.”

Mr. Fabian and others who work with municipal bonds cited two main concerns coming out of Detroit. First was the city’s plan to put several different kinds of bonds, plus the retirees, into one big category — unsecured creditors — even though bonds were issued with many different ratings and promised investors different interest rates accordingly. If Detroit succeeds in lumping them all together in a single bankruptcy class, then by logic, the bonds of other Michigan cities should have their ratings changed to reflect that. The ratings would go down, and the investors holding the bonds would take losses.

Creditors recalled that Michigan’s state treasurer helped to market some of Detroit’s debt, encouraging investors to buy it as very safe.

“Now they’re saying that the investors are getting what they deserve, and they should have known better,” Mr. Fabian said. “So you can’t really trust the statements of the state government.”

The other concern was that the federal bankruptcy court might ultimately approve Detroit’s treatment of bondholders, setting a precedent that distressed cities in other states might be tempted to follow. Their borrowing costs would then also rise, and that would undercut the way most of the country’s roads, bridges and schools are built — planned and financed at the local level.

Local officials in Michigan were putting on brave faces Thursday, saying the chill in the market might prove to be temporary, or to have been caused by broad credit conditions unrelated to Detroit. As the Federal Reserve has signaled a coming end to its easy-money policies, interest rates have been rising, making it more expensive for almost everyone to borrow.

“There’s been a lot of things going on in the market,” said Linda Morrison, the city finance manager for Battle Creek. Since last spring, her city had been planning to raise $16 million to pay for a new roof and better seating for the Kellogg Arena, among other improvements. She said that none of the projects were needed urgently and that Battle Creek could afford to wait for more favorable market conditions.

She said she was aware that Detroit’s bankruptcy plan had dealt a blow to longstanding beliefs about a city’s “full faith, credit and taxing power.” But, she added, maybe the judge would decide things in the bondholders’ favor, and the markets would come back.

“Who’s to say that the court won’t decide it that way?” she said.

Source: Dealbook