Now is the time for officials from cities, states and other municipal bond-issuing entities to head to Washington, D.C. and make their case for preserving the tax exemption on bonds and private activity bonds.
"The real negotiations have started in earnest very recently between the House Ways and Means and Senate Finance, so this is the window," said Jarrod Loadholt, a partner at Ice Miller LLP.
"This is where members are seeing the words 'private activity bonds,' and their staffers are like, "What should I do?'" Loadholt said. "If you're an issuer, this is fly-in season. Sign up and go. Don't hope someone else is going to solve this for you — they're not."
Loadholt made the comments Tuesday during a webinar hosted by the Council of Development Finance Agencies urging members to press their federal representatives to preserve community development finance tools, chief among them private activity bonds.
The webinar comes as
Lawmakers are still debating
The Congressional calendar will serve as a guide to reconciliation negotiations, with recesses set for Memorial Day, July 4 and August.
"Do advocacy between now and then," Loadholt advised. "When there's a recess, they go home, so you want to see progress by those dates."
PABs are used by a swath of governmental entities, from airports to hospitals to charter schools and private colleges. Airports alone issued $22 billion in 2024, said Kristopher Wahlers, partner at Ice Miller LLP, during the webinar.
"Airports and multi-family and single-family housing, those are categories which have a huge market and have a huge impact," he said.
Wahlers noted that Congress has already placed limits on PABs with annual volume caps, which are allocated among states. "Congress has already done a lot of work to restrict how many of these can be issued," he said.
CDFA President and CEO Toby Rittner said the organization is ramping up its advocacy amid a barrage of Trump administration attacks on federal programs and policies that support community development. The CDFA is urging its members to send lawmakers a "preserve and protect tax exemption bonds" letter with specific case studies tailored to their districts.
"We find ourselves in a pretty precarious position," Rittner said. "We always want to be nonpolitical ... but we find ourselves this year in a very defensive position with the new administration dismantling and attacking the federal programs that support our industry."
Rittner echoed the importance of CDFA members and other bond-issuing entities visiting their representatives in person and pointing to specific projects and institutions that would be hurt by eliminating tax-exempt PABs.
"I was in 11 Republican offices last week and each one said, 'We need a really good reason to say no to eliminating [the PABs tax exemption],'" Rittner said.
"You want to be able to show there's an impact in your backyard if you press that button the wrong way," he said. "If they don't hear from you and don't have a visible physical repercussion, they will not raise their hand in those meetings and say we shouldn't put this in."
Loadholt said local officials make more of an impact than lobbyists or other market professionals. "Lobbyists are nice but locals are better," he said. "The best way to get a message across is not me but to bring in the project sponsors [to] put a face on projects," he said, recommending that advocates talk to lawmakers "like they're five-year-olds: with pictures and simple stories."
