California's AG's opinion targets school bond practices​

California's Attorney General issued an opinion on the practices where district investment bankers, financial consultants, and bond attorneys offer to contract with a school district to provide the pre-election services that the district seeks help in passing bonds.  In many instances the firm agrees to provide the pre-election services at no, or reduced, charge to the district in exchange for the district's promise to select the firm as its contractor to provide postelection services, if the bonds are approved by the voters.  The AG opines that this practice violates California law if districts hire outside firms to campaign for bond ballot measures or purposely incentivize municipal finance professionals to advocate for passage of a bond measure.

Parcel Tax Training

On January 26th MCOE hosted the Parcel Tax Training provided by the Marin County Department of Finance. We had a total of sixteen attendees and a total of ten districts were represented.

Parcel Tax Webpage

The Parcel Tax webpage was reviewed at the January DBO Committee Meeting and we are working to add the following:

• Legend for all categories
• Breakdown for the Instructional Category

A final draft of the Parcel Tax webpage will be brought before the DBO Committee at the February meeting for final review before making it live on the MCOE website.

ERATE

Fred Brakeman presented an update on Erate to the DBO Committee on January 20, 2016. Click here for the Marin COE E-Rate Presentation.

W-2 Distribution