Ehlers on Public Finance: Building Better Communities.

• Author: Anders, Alan L.

Ehlers, Robert L.

Rochester, Minnesota: Lone Oak Press, Ltd. 1998. (392 pp)

Reviewed by Alan L. Anders, Director of Financing Policy of the New York City Office of Management and Budget and Treasurer of the New York City Municipal Finance Authority and of the New York City Transitional Finance Authority. Anders is Vice Chairman of the GFOA Debt and Fiscal Policy Committee.

When I was starting out as a young investment banker and financial advisor 20 years ago, my bible was the Municipal Finance Officers Association textbook Municipal Bonds: Planning, Sale, and Administration by Lennox L. Moak. At long last, someone has made an admirable attempt at writing the next generation standard public finance text. The author is Robert Ehlers who, until 10 years ago, had his own financial advisory firm.

In comprehensiveness and in sheer bulk, Ehlers' work is certainly a match for the late Moak's. And in many unexpected ways, the Ehlers' book is refreshing and even an antidote to some of the more formulaic training texts available in the market.

Ehlers brings to his writing a perspective and point of view grounded in a solid, Midwestern American ethic that he must have encountered repeatedly as a financial advisor. For example, Ehlers devotes a whole chapter to the topic, "To Bond or Not to Bond." Ehlers patiently explains the importance of fairly apportioning the intergenerational burden of public improvements and points out the budgetary common sense of bonds. What comes across is a financial advisor seasoned by countless late evening town meetings with opinionated citizens to whom "borrowing" is as much of a moral issue as a technical one.

Consequently, the most logical readership for his text is the small and infrequent issuer, the town, county, or school district citizen manager. Ehlers is quite blunt in his introduction in stating that he has tried to make his book nontechnical. He has succeeded.

This is a text that would try the patience of a freshly minted MBA or MPA graduate, steeped in present value concepts and trained to analyze refundings in terms of preserving optionality. Issuers large enough to be hiring such staff would be better advised offering them alternatives such as Municipal Bonds by Robert Lamb and Stephen Rappaport or even that old...