Jobs bill clears way for $1.4 billion in school construction bonds

Here’s one way the jobs bill headed for the president’s desk today will affect New York City: it unfreezes more than $1 billion in school construction bonds the city needs to fund its capital plan.

The bonds were effectively frozen because of a significant flaw in last year’s federal stimulus bill, which set aside $22 billion over two years for school districts to sell interest-free bonds to fund school construction. As Pro Publica reported late last year, many banks refused to buy the bonds because they were funded by tax credits that investors found worthless.

The jobs bill the Senate passed today aims to solve that problem by using a direct subsidy, rather than a tax credit, to pay banks for the bonds. (The House passed a similar bill last month and President Barack Obama is expected to sign it.)

New York City, like many school districts around the country, had delayed issuing any bonds because of this problem, according to the mayor’s preliminary budget plan released in January. In the mayor’s plan, the Office of Management and Budget noted that it expected Congress to revise the school construction bond program and predicted that when it did, the city would successfully be able to issue all $1.4 billion in bonds.

The city needs all of the funds provided by the school construction bonds, plus an additional $300 million from another federal bond program, in order to carry out all of the construction proposed in its five-year capital plan. The bonds fund a total of $1.7 billion of the city’s $11.3 billion capital plan, which was approved last year.

There’s no deadline for the city to issue the $699 million in bonds set aside for New York City in 2009 and the $664 million allocated for 2010, a spokeswoman for the federal Treasury Department said today, so the city’s delay in issuing the bonds won’t hurt its school construction plans.

Comptroller John Liu, who last month urged New York’s Congressional delegation to swap the direct subsidy for the tax credits in the bond program, today called the Senate’s bill “a tremendous victory for our schoolkids.”