>

The Ridgewood Symphony Orchestra is a regional, all volunteer, intergenerational orchestra located in Ridgewood, New Jersey. Supported by the surrounding communities and friends in neighboring areas, the orchestra serves the Northern New Jersey region with many musical and educational activities. These include the outstanding Festival Strings Youth Orchestra, which provides a unique opportunity for young string players to benefit from the experience of playing in an orchestral setting.

https://www.ridgewoodsymphony.org/

Next Concert…

Friday, February 27, 2009

at 8:00 PM

Paramus High School Auditorium

99 Century Road

Paramus, NJ 07652

●
“The French Connection”

Music of Claude Debussy, Maurice Ravel and César Franck

●

Featuring: Gary Graffman, piano

&

Diane Wittry,
Conductor and Artistic Director
https://www.ridgewoodsymphony.org/

>By Terrence Dopp and Jeremy R. Cooke

https://www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=20601109&sid=aYXbUWrzknFg&refer=home#

Feb. 12 (Bloomberg) — New Jersey Governor Jon Corzine wants to require state and local politicians to gather competitive bids for buying everything from office supplies to pickup trucks — just not necessarily for the financing.

Corzine, a first-term Democrat and the former head of Goldman, Sachs & Co., says bond sales wouldn’t be included in his push to end no-bid public contracts in his state. In the past year and a half, 95 percent of New Jersey’s offerings were sold via negotiations. More than a dozen academic studies show that opening sales to competitive bidding saves taxpayers money.

“I’m in favor of competitive bidding when somebody shows up,” the governor said in a Feb. 6 interview aboard the inaugural trip of an express train to whisk gamblers from Manhattan to Atlantic City. “But if nobody shows up, then you’re in a negotiated situation anyway. The realities of the marketplace today are different.”

Citing consolidation among underwriters over the past year and soft institutional demand that sent yields for tax-exempt bonds higher than rates on comparable Treasuries, Corzine and others say competition in the $2.67 trillion municipal bond market doesn’t always bring lower costs. Last year, state and local politicians chose negotiations over bids for 86 percent of the $391.5 billion in long-term municipal bonds sold. This month, officials in Georgia, one of the top-rated U.S. states, joined them for the first time in a decade.

Accelerating Trend

The trend toward negotiated sales may be accelerating, even as Christopher “Kit” Taylor, a former chief regulator, calls for banning the practice to stem corruption. No-bid deals in New Mexico are at the heart of a federal investigation into how a political contributor to Governor Bill Richardson won state financial work. The probe led Richardson to withdraw from consideration for U.S. commerce secretary in January.

Last year, Corzine, 62, prohibited state agencies from awarding contracts to campaign contributors — a ban he’s asking the legislature to extend to New Jersey’s municipalities.

Competitive bond offerings force banks to line up on an advertised day and submit the lowest interest-cost bid to win underwriting business. In a negotiated sale, states and cities decide in advance which banks will market the bonds. Underwriters have promoted the no-bid method, saying it allows them to get the best prices for issuers by tailoring the debt to specific types of investors.

Bid sales saved issuers 17 to 48 basis points, “on average and all else equal,” according to a study published in the Winter 2008 issue of the Municipal Finance Journal. A basis point is 0.01 percentage point. On $100 million of debt, the savings mean $1.7 million to $4.8 million less interest over the life of a 10-year bond.

Yield Ratio Flipped

The research by Mark Robbins and Bill Simonsen of the University of Connecticut in West Hartford cited “almost all studies on this issue.”

“That’s in normalized times,” Corzine said of the findings. “We’re not in normalized times. With the current circumstances, you’ve reduced the number of purchasers to a narrower and narrower group.”

Municipalities that don’t expect multiple bidders should use negotiation for bond offerings, Robbins, one of the researchers, said in an interview. High-quality issues will still draw bids, which results in lower costs, he said.

“Nothing has changed in the market that would mean the market wouldn’t work the same way it always has,” he said. “It’s just going to be harder to attract bidders.”

Georgia’s Switch

In December, as investors sought the safety of Treasury debt, even the highest-rated states and cities paid as much as 2.2 times what the federal government was paying. That was a record, according to data compiled by Municipal Market Advisors and Bloomberg. Since then, the so-called yield ratio of AAA tax- exempt bonds to comparable Treasuries reached 1.38. Before the credit crisis, it averaged 0.96.

Four of the 12 largest municipal-bond underwriters in 2007, including New York-based Merrill Lynch & Co., merged with other banks last year. A fifth, Zurich-based UBS AG, exited the institutional public finance business.

The auction-rate securities market also collapsed last year, and all except three tax-exempt bond insurers were stripped of top ratings. Bigger institutional investors shook the market with waves of selling that sent municipal bonds to a 4 percent loss, their worst performance in nine years, based on Bank of America Merrill Lynch indexes.

Georgia, the most populous of seven states with top grades from the three major credit-rating firms, opted for its negotiated fixed-rate bond sale in response to such conditions.

‘Negative Signal’

The resulting annual debt service was $5.9 million below budget and the rates “more favorable” than those received in the state’s last bond sale in June, Governor Sonny Perdue said in a Feb. 4 news release.

State leaders chose negotiation to market the bonds to retail investors and to allow for increasing the offering’s size as demand allowed, said Susan Hart Ridley, director of Georgia’s Financing and Investment Division. Officials initially planned to offer as little as $200 million and ultimately raised the amount to $614 million.

It would have been the largest competitive municipal deal since the market freeze that followed Lehman Brothers Holdings Inc.’s bankruptcy, Bloomberg data show.

“If we didn’t get any bids, I would think that would send a negative signal about the quality of our debt,” Ridley said.

The Port Authority of New York and New Jersey got no bids on Dec. 3 for a $300 million sale of taxable three-year notes.

‘No Risk Whatsoever’

“It’s not necessarily comparable to us, but it’s an indicator of where the market was, the tenuous nature of the market” at the time, Ridley said.

There’s no proof that a canceled round of bids “would put a taint on your issue,” said Joy Howard, principal at St. Louis- based WM Financial, adviser to local governments on bond sales.

Florida this week returned to its usual practice of auctioning fixed-rate debt, after negotiating a bond deal at the beginning of January when benchmark yields were higher.

The state attracted seven bidders for $200 million of bonds to finance capital spending for schools. Barclays Plc’s winning interest cost of 4.7 percent beat out bids that were all within 0.05 percentage point, said Ben Watkins, director of the state’s Division of Bond Finance.

‘Pretty Efficiently’

“That’s indicative of a market that’s functioning pretty efficiently,” Watkins said. “High-grade frequent issuers with name recognition and very straightforward credit are in demand.”

Negotiated deals make sense for offerings “that are less solid,” said John Mousseau, a municipal portfolio manager at Vineland, New Jersey-based Cumberland Advisors Inc., in an e- mail. “However, it is very evident that dealers are taking no risk whatsoever these days.”

The New York Yankees hired Goldman Sachs Group Inc., successor to Corzine’s former firm, to manage the team’s second round of city-approved tax-exempt ballpark financing last month. Yankee Stadium LLC agreed to pay 7 percent on $259 million of 40- year bonds. The next day, the same securities jumped in price and fell in yield by about half a percentage point, according to Municipal Securities Rulemaking Board trade data.

“They left an incredible amount of money on the table for the Yankees,” because the drop in yield indicates investors may have been willing to settle for less interest, Mousseau said. Alice McGillion, a Yankees spokeswoman, didn’t reply to a request for comment on the financing.

Ban Proponent

Taylor, who calls for banning negotiated debt sales, was executive director of the tax-exempt bond industry’s self- regulatory organization, the MSRB, for almost three decades until 2007.

He proposes a national market that would force dealers to bid for maturities of new tax-exempt issues they want to sell. The format would help address concern that fewer dealers and less capital have hurt the market, Taylor said.

Since 1994, MSRB rules have limited campaign contributions by underwriters trying to win business in so-called pay-to-play practices. That requirement doesn’t apply to financial advisers who contract with public agencies.

Corzine took steps to limit corruption in the state government’s executive branch with four executive orders he signed in September 2008. Among other things, they prohibited agencies from awarding contracts to campaign donors and expanded employees’ financial disclosure requirements.

Pushing Lawmakers

Now he’s asking state lawmakers to extend the ban on contractor contributions to the county and local levels, replace a patchwork of local finance regulations with one state law and prohibit those holding contracts with school districts from giving to municipal candidates or political action committees.

The New Mexico investigation that kept Richardson out of President Barack Obama’s cabinet echoes a pay-to-play scandal from more than a decade ago in New Jersey. In 1995, former Governor Jim Florio’s chief of staff, Joseph C. Salema, pleaded guilty to sharing in more than $200,000 in payments from a New Jersey bank that sought a bond offering in Camden County.

As the case broke in 1993, Florio signed two executive orders specifying that competitive bidding should be used for bond sales, with certain exceptions approved by the state treasurer. While the orders were in effect, from May 1993 to October 1994, negotiated financing dropped to less than 50 percent of bond sales from 79 percent.

Complexity in Abundance

In 1994, then-Governor Christine Todd Whitman issued a new order, establishing conditions in which negotiations would be allowed. They included sales of poor or complex credits, issues involving an untested financing structure and deals made in volatile markets.

Since September 2007, the state has sold $8.25 billion of bonds via negotiation and $456 million through bids, according to data provided by New Jersey’s Treasury Department.

“We’re in some of the most volatile market conditions in the history of Wall Street,” Tom Vincz, a treasury spokesman, said in an e-mail. “Given the many calisthenics to exit the auction-rate securities market last year, complexity was in abundance.”

To contact the reporters on this story: Terrence Dopp in Trenton, New Jersey at [email protected]; Jeremy R. Cooke in New York at [email protected].

Last Updated: February 12, 2009 11:10 EST
https://www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=20601109&sid=aYXbUWrzknFg&refer=home#

>New York Law Journal

Vesselin Mitev

February 11, 2009

https://www.law.com/jsp/nlj/PubArticleNLJ.jsp?id=1202428177805

Obtaining regular reports from Steven T. Rondos, the Brooklyn attorney accused of fleecing guardianship accounts of $4 million, was like “pulling teeth,” said one of the court-appointed examiners charged with monitoring Rondos’ performance.

Albert E. Spencer, a Manhattan attorney, inherited two cases from prior court examiners in early 2006. He said that Rondos had not provided the required reports for 2004, 2005 and 2006.

After Rondos’ indictment last month, the Office of Court Administration acknowledged that court examiners who monitored Rondos’ accounts should have detected sooner at least some of the alleged thefts that occurred between 2001 and 2008.

At least 16 examiners had signed off on the accounts that gave rise to the investigation of Rondos.

David Bookstaver, an OCA spokesman, said that five examiners, who monitored accounts from which $2.4 million allegedly was stolen, have resigned in the wake of the investigation of Rondos’ conduct, which began last year. Another has been suspended pending further inquiry.

Court officials are continuing to go through “thick files” to determine to what extent examiners failed to conduct due diligence, Bookstaver said.

Spencer has not been asked to resign. And he said in an interview that he had performed his duties as an examiner conscientiously “without a doubt.”

Rondos is charged with stealing $45,000 during April 10 to June 12, 2008 from one of the accounts Spencer served as examiner.

Spencer said that Rondos engaged in “stringing us along” by requesting repeated delays and offering excuses for tardy filings. On one occasion, Spencer recalled that the guardian claimed that he could not work for a month because he had suffered several broken limbs in an accident.

Spencer said he gave Rondos the benefit of the doubt and at first tried to be patient.

“Usually when we go at this we don’t try to act in a hostile manner because ultimately that results in more delay and we had no indication that Steven Rondos [would] be accused of bad acts,” Spencer said, pointing to Rondos’ position as vice-chair of the guardianship committee of the state bar’s Elder Law section as evidence of his prominence in the field.

“My letters to him began to get more hostile as time continued,” Spencer said, and in July 2008, after two compliance conferences, he said he moved to permanently remove Rondos.

Such a move usually is viewed as a last resort, Spencer said.

“One of the difficult factors in making that call is that there aren’t that many people around who want to take [the guardianship] job,” he said, adding that often times the guardian is a relative of the ward and may not be an attorney.

By the time Spencer moved against Rondos, the guardian already was under investigation.

According to the indictment, Rondos, 44, of Ridgewood, N.J., allegedly stole from 23 living victims including mentally and physically impaired elderly people as well as children, and one estate. Rondos and his firm, Raia & Rondos in Brooklyn, were both named in the indictment.

His wife, Camille Raia, the firm’s other named partner, has not been charged, but she was the named guardian of Andrea Spagnoletti, whose account was fleeced of more than $1 million, according to the prosecutor.

Rondos was extradited from New Jersey and arraigned before Manhattan Supreme Court Justice Michael H. Melkonian last week. He pleaded not guilty and was remanded on $2 million bail. His attorney, David Frankel, has not responded to requests for comment.

EXAMINER REACTION

Court examiners contacted bristled at the suggestion that their lack of supervision contributed to the alleged thefts.

Brooklyn attorney Paul I. Krohn, who has been suspended from the list of court examiners, said that his suspension “had nothing to do with Rondos as far as I’m concerned,” but declined to comment further.

According to Bookstaver, Manhattan attorney Seymour Ostrow was one of the five people who resigned from the examiner list. Ostrow disputes that.

“I sure as hell never resigned,” although he said that he had agreed not to take new cases after he broke his hip about a year ago.

Ostrow insisted that he had “kept after [Mr. Rondos] … even with a broken hip.”

Ostrow said his reviews of Rondos’ accounting turned up “nothing untoward.” And he said that he had gone above and beyond the call of duty as an examiner.

“My reports are 50 to 100 pages where others turn in five and 10 pages, I analyze the law, I visit homes,” he said, adding that he had even trained himself in accounting in order to do a better job.

Lewis E. Alperin, a Mount Vernon attorney who was the court examiner in one of Rondos’ cases said he felt “lucky” that there had been no theft under his watch, although the district attorney has asked Rondos to forfeit $36,090 in earnings from the account.

Alperin said that reflected commissions taken by Rondos before they were due, an issue the two had argued about.

“One of my issues with him was how he should take commissions — we disagreed strongly on how to compute commissions. What he wanted was double the amount,” Alperin said.

Alperin, who has not been suspended or asked to resign, said that as an examiner, he said, one can only do so much.

“If your intent as a lawyer is to steal then you are going to get away with it for a while,” Alperin said.

He noted that a guardian who is appointed in January 2008 has until May 2009 to file a report and then “you can say ‘Oh, I’m a little behind, I’m just waiting for some bank statements,’ so the examiner gets the report in June or July.”

Court examiners are not court employees and are appointed from a list compiled by each Appellate Division department of lawyers and others who have met specific educational and training requirements. They are compensated annually based on the size of the estate they are monitoring.

In a 2005 report, a state commission on court fiduciaries concluded that court examiners are “key to guardian oversight in New York” but found significant problems with the process, including cursory examinations of financial records, rare face-to-face interviews with guardians and poor lines of communication.

According to the report, the average court examiner in New York handles “well over 100 examinations annually” for relatively low fees. They rely on volume to turn a profit.

The commission issued a number of recommendations, including increasing the annual compensation limit of court examiners to $75,000 and creating the position of a court examiner specialist to help oversee examiners and deal with problematic cases.

Chief Administrative Judge Ann Pfau said that oversight would be further tightened in the wake of the alleged thefts, including immediately implementing an electronic tracking system to warn officials of potential problems with the filing of guardians’ reports and mandatory compliance conferences.

The commission’s chair, Sheila L. Birnbaum, said that the reforms had resulted in “many fewer complaints” about the system but cautioned that a theft-proof system could be unrealistic.

“You can’t stop people from fraud and being crooks,” said Birnbaum, a partner in Skadden, Arps, Slate, Meagher & Flom.

https://www.law.com/jsp/nlj/PubArticleNLJ.jsp?id=1202428177805

>I just got it in the mail today, and I thank you very much for sending it. It confirms what I know has been a major problem. The newspaper, perhaps inadvertently, set up the debate as between reform and traditional math (in the call-out box), never mentioning that the findings of the NMPanel do not support what reformers call reform. The battle for a solid math curriculum is lost if the reformers get their appealing description into the public eye as reform, and traditional math is described in totally negative terms. The battle is at its core about the intellectual content of the math curriculum and its adequacy. Reform math simply teaches much less math, and incoherently to boot. Can you get in something to correct what is a common misunderstanding, maybe even by this alert reporter? Can you get something on record somewhere that the Board has purposely excluded anyone who could bring a research perspective to the discussion.

Fishbein is another story. Right now, 3 of the 4 consultants are clearly on the Reform side, and Posamentier and I are not on the same page in most respects. He is a math ed prof, and I’m into education research. I’m the only one who would bring that perspective, and that seems to be the one perspective the Board does not want. I have no idea what Fishbein is insinuating about costs for me. All I ever indicated was plane costs, and I would even waive that if the Board was open-minded enough to want to know what is supportable by rational evidence. I’d pay my own way, if necessary. I find the Board’s approach to be reprehensible–they seem to be totally opposed to even finding out what is supported by research. I doubt they would do that if medical care were an issue.

Sandra

>**Stimulus Bill Content Alert**

Ruin Your Health With the Obama Stimulus Plan: Betsy McCaughey

Commentary by Betsy McCaughey

https://www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=20601039&refer=columnist_mccaughey&sid=aLzfDxfbwhzs#

Feb. 9 (Bloomberg) — Republican Senators are questioning whether President Barack Obama’s stimulus bill contains the right mix of tax breaks and cash infusions to jump-start the economy.

Tragically, no one from either party is objecting to the health provisions slipped in without discussion. These provisions reflect the handiwork of Tom Daschle, until recently the nominee to head the Health and Human Services Department.

Senators should read these provisions and vote against them because they are dangerous to your health. (Page numbers refer to H.R. 1 EH, pdf version).

The bill’s health rules will affect “every individual in the United States” (445, 454, 479). Your medical treatments will be tracked electronically by a federal system. Having electronic medical records at your fingertips, easily transferred to a hospital, is beneficial. It will help avoid duplicate tests and errors.

But the bill goes further. One new bureaucracy, the National Coordinator of Health Information Technology, will monitor treatments to make sure your doctor is doing what the federal government deems appropriate and cost effective. The goal is to reduce costs and “guide” your doctor’s decisions (442, 446). These provisions in the stimulus bill are virtually identical to what Daschle prescribed in his 2008 book, “Critical: What We Can Do About the Health-Care Crisis.” According to Daschle, doctors have to give up autonomy and “learn to operate less like solo practitioners.”

Keeping doctors informed of the newest medical findings is important, but enforcing uniformity goes too far.

New Penalties

Hospitals and doctors that are not “meaningful users” of the new system will face penalties. “Meaningful user” isn’t defined in the bill. That will be left to the HHS secretary, who will be empowered to impose “more stringent measures of meaningful use over time” (511, 518, 540-541)

What penalties will deter your doctor from going beyond the electronically delivered protocols when your condition is atypical or you need an experimental treatment? The vagueness is intentional. In his book, Daschle proposed an appointed body with vast powers to make the “tough” decisions elected politicians won’t make.

The stimulus bill does that, and calls it the Federal Coordinating Council for Comparative Effectiveness Research (190-192). The goal, Daschle’s book explained, is to slow the development and use of new medications and technologies because they are driving up costs. He praises Europeans for being more willing to accept “hopeless diagnoses” and “forgo experimental treatments,” and he chastises Americans for expecting too much from the health-care system.

Elderly Hardest Hit

Daschle says health-care reform “will not be pain free.” Seniors should be more accepting of the conditions that come with age instead of treating them. That means the elderly will bear the brunt.

Medicare now pays for treatments deemed safe and effective. The stimulus bill would change that and apply a cost- effectiveness standard set by the Federal Council (464).

The Federal Council is modeled after a U.K. board discussed in Daschle’s book. This board approves or rejects treatments using a formula that divides the cost of the treatment by the number of years the patient is likely to benefit. Treatments for younger patients are more often approved than treatments for diseases that affect the elderly, such as osteoporosis.

In 2006, a U.K. health board decreed that elderly patients with macular degeneration had to wait until they went blind in one eye before they could get a costly new drug to save the other eye. It took almost three years of public protests before the board reversed its decision.

Hidden Provisions

If the Obama administration’s economic stimulus bill passes the Senate in its current form, seniors in the U.S. will face similar rationing. Defenders of the system say that individuals benefit in younger years and sacrifice later.

The stimulus bill will affect every part of health care, from medical and nursing education, to how patients are treated and how much hospitals get paid. The bill allocates more funding for this bureaucracy than for the Army, Navy, Marines, and Air Force combined (90-92, 174-177, 181).

Hiding health legislation in a stimulus bill is intentional. Daschle supported the Clinton administration’s health-care overhaul in 1994, and attributed its failure to debate and delay. A year ago, Daschle wrote that the next president should act quickly before critics mount an opposition. “If that means attaching a health-care plan to the federal budget, so be it,” he said. “The issue is too important to be stalled by Senate protocol.”

More Scrutiny Needed

On Friday, President Obama called it “inexcusable and irresponsible” for senators to delay passing the stimulus bill. In truth, this bill needs more scrutiny.

The health-care industry is the largest employer in the U.S. It produces almost 17 percent of the nation’s gross domestic product. Yet the bill treats health care the way European governments do: as a cost problem instead of a growth industry. Imagine limiting growth and innovation in the electronics or auto industry during this downturn. This stimulus is dangerous to your health and the economy.

(Betsy McCaughey is former lieutenant governor of New York and is an adjunct senior fellow at the Hudson Institute. The opinions expressed are her own.)

To contact the writer of this column: Betsy McCaughey at [email protected]

Last Updated: February 9, 2009 00:01 EST

From:
https://www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=20601039&refer=columnist_mccaughey&sid=aLzfDxfbwhzs#