Southwest

Mission Regional Medical Center, in the Lower Rio Grande Valley of Texas, suffered a five-notch downgrade to B-minus from Standard & Poor's Global Ratings. The downgrade affects $26.5 million of outstanding debt.

With revenues continuing to fall below forecast, Kansas Gov. Sam Brownback reduced spending by $100 million, with cuts to universities, transportation, and Medicaid, among other services.

The Texas Supreme Court’s decision to uphold Texas’ “Byzantine” school funding formula will end three years of litigation but have no immediate impact on state or local school district credits, according to Moody’s Investors Service.

Days after winning voter approval of $155 million of bonds to keep pace with growth, the Anna Independent School District on the outskirts of Dallas took a two-notch downgrade from Moody's Investors Service. Anna was one of dozens of Texas school districts whose voters approved nearly $5 billion of bonds May 7.

The trustee firm in many recent troubled bond deals assembled by accused fraudster Christopher Brogdon is taking a harder line against the former employee it blames for its involvement in the mess.

New Mexico is competitively selling $333 million of severance tax bonds after two downgrades attributed to declining oil and gas revenues.

German Pellets Texas LLC and Texas Pellets Inc. filed petitions for Chapter 11 reorganization last month with $184.7 million of tax-exempt industrial development bonds outstanding.

The Texas Supreme Court upheld the constitutionality of the state’s school finance system, ending four years of litigation over unequal funding.

Facing new federal constraints on tax-exempt debt for projects with a private revenue stream, El Paso County, Texas, refunded tax-exempts with taxable bonds and still achieved interest rate savings.

Colorado state lawmakers have passed legislation designed to validate previous elections of special districts and protect them from legal challenges to their “qualified electors” who vote to create the districts and authorize issuances of tax-exempt bonds.