Webinar: Managing the $5 trillion of state and local government debt

State and local governments have over $5 trillion in long-term liabilities. Reason Foundation recently hosted public finance experts for a webinar on how governments can manage their growing debt costs while still funding essential public services, keeping pension promises to workers, managing financial risks, improving financial reporting, and moving toward more sustainable budgets and debt levels.

State and local governments carry roughly $5 trillion in long-term liabilities, mostly in the form of unfunded pension obligations, bonded debt, and unfunded retiree health benefits. These commitments are shaping budgets, credit ratings, spending decisions, and tax policy.

The past several years have been unusually volatile for state and local governments. In the years immediately following the COVID-19 pandemic, state and local governments experienced strong revenues and large inflows of federal aid. But the tides changed as interest rates rose, federal funding to states became increasingly politicized, and inflation pressured public sector salaries and pension costs.

The panelists are Andy Matthews, Nevada state controller, Farhad Omeyr, director of research and data at the National League of Cities, and Don Boyd, co-director of the Project on State and Local Government Finance at the University at Albany, SUNY.

The discussion featured new data from Reason Foundation’s Government Financial Transparency Project reports and GovFinance Dashboard, which offer a detailed view of the size and composition of state and local debt.

You can watch the webinar here:

Moderator: Mariana Trujillo, Reason Foundation 

More on the panelists:

Andy Matthews

Andy Matthews is Nevada’s State Controller and the state’s chief fiscal officer. Before taking office in 2023, he served in the Nevada Assembly representing District 37 and was president of the Nevada Policy Research Institute, where his work focused on fiscal responsibility, government transparency, and market-oriented public policy reform.

Don Boyd

Donald J. Boyd, PhD, is co-director of the Project on State and Local Government Finance. He has more than three decades of experience analyzing state and local government finance, including prior service as director of fiscal studies at the Rockefeller Institute of Government, executive director of the State Budget Crisis Task Force, and senior fiscal official for New York State’s budget and legislative tax offices.

Farhad Omeyr

Farhad Omeyr, PhD, is the Program Director of Research and Data at the National League of Cities. Farhad’s research focuses on financial management and fiscal policy issues of local governments, particularly related to municipal capital and infrastructure budgeting and spending, municipal bond market, municipal tax authorities, and fiscal professionalism / “best practices”. Farhad leads NLC’s annual City Fiscal Condition (CFC) and Municipal Infrastructure Conditions (MIC) reports.

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Source: https://reason.org/commentary/webinar-managing-the-5-trillion-of-state-and-local-government-debt/