Far West

California local finance expert Michael Coleman reported that local school bond and tax measures had their worst showing Tuesday since he began tracking them in 2001.

City Council members of the scandal-plagued city of Bell voted unanimously Tuesday to hold a special election for their own recall.

WASHINGTON — The Internal Revenue Service announced Wednesday that it is giving tribal governments until the end of 2011 to issue the first $1 billion tranche of tribal economic development bonds, in an effort to save the tribes from having to forfeit any unused allocations at year-end.

Lawmakers will go back to the drawing board for a multi-year transportation bill when Republicans take over leadership of the House in January, but market participants think such a bill may have a chance of squeezing through a divided Congress next year.

The Securities and Exchange Commission unanimously agreed to propose rules for establishing a broad whistleblower program less than a week after an SEC attorney said the agency has obtained numerous queries from muni market participants interested in reporting abuses for awards.

WASHINGTON — Municipal borrowers are much slower than corporations to complete annual audited financial reports, confirming many analysts’ claims that muni issuers’ annual financial disclosures are often stale, a new report shows.

SAN FRANCISCO — The University of California will sell $760 million of mostly taxable Build America Bonds next week to help finance upgrades to three medical centers.

If a state authority issues bonds to pay catastrophe insurance claims, they would not qualify as private-activity bonds because they would be backed with generally applicable taxes and not private payments, the Internal Revenue Service concluded in a recent private-letter ruling.

The Internal Revenue Service is seeking applicants for a tax-exempt bond expert to join its Advisory Committee on Tax-Exempt and Government Entities.

WASHINGTON — The Municipal Securities Rulemaking Board has filed with the Securities and Exchange Commission the first batch of proposals to extend to municipal advisers its rules on fair-dealing, disciplinary actions and administrative requirements.