Frank Shafroth Leaves MSRB

Frank Shafroth on Friday left the Municipal Securities Rulemaking Board, where he was director of legislative affairs and intergovernmental relationships, to focus on his post at George Mason University.

Shafroth is an assistant professor at the university and director of its Center for State and Local Leadership.

He has a grant from the MacArthur Foundation to look at severely stressed cities and is currently examining Baltimore, Pittsburgh, Chicago, Detroit, Providence, R.I., and San Bernardino, Calif.  He has been at George Mason since 2003, at first as an adjunct professor, and was juggling both jobs in recent years.

Shafroth joined the MSRB as a consultant in 2009 and became a director in March 2010.

In 2011, he also worked with the State Budget Crisis Task Force, chaired by Richard Ravitch, former Lt. Gov. in New York, and Paul Volcker, former chairman of the Federal Reserve Board, to develop threats to the near and long-term fiscal sustainability of Virginia, one of six states examined by the task force.

Shafroth has been a local official, educator, legislative aide, lobbyist and outspoken advocate of tax-exempt financing for more than three decades.

Before joining the MSRB, he was chief of staff for Rep. James Moran, D-Va., a member of the House Appropriations Committee. He was teaching public policy, budget and tax courses at the university’s school of public administration at that time. He began working for Moran in June 2007.

From September 2003 to June 2007, he was director of intergovernmental affairs for Arlington County, Va.

Shafroth was director of state and federal relations for the National Governors Association from May 1999 to April 2003.

Before that, he was director of policy and federal relations for the National League of Cities for 18 years.

Market participants credit Shafroth with ingeniously using the Boy Scouts to save municipal bonds from past proposals to severely curb on eliminate tax-exemption. He argued in the 1980s that, under an administration proposal that would render governmental bonds taxable if more than 1% of the proceeds were used for private purposes, bonds used to finance an elementary school would become taxable if the Boy Scouts rented the school for two weeks of the year.

Before becoming a lobbyist, Shafroth was a congressional staffer for several years. In 1979 and 1980, he was an assistant counsel to the Senate Banking Committee’s subcommittee on housing and urban development, where he first became involved with tax-exempt bonds. In 1978 and 1979 he was a staffer to then-Sen. John Heinz, 3rd, R-Pa. a banking committee member. From January 1975 to July 1978, he was projects director for Rep. Gladys Noon Spellman, D-Md., who represented Prince Georges County.

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