Moody’s Corp., the world’s second largest ratings firm, has agreed to pay 21 states and the District of Columbia $426.3 million as part of an $864 million settlement with state and federal authorities over its ratings of mortgage securities leading up to the Great Recession. The remaining $437.5 million was a penalty that will be paid to the U.S. Department of Justice.

“Moody’s failed to adhere to its own credit-rating standards and fell short on its pledge of transparency in the run-up to the Great Recession,” Principal Deputy Associate Attorney General Bill Baer said in a statement.

The world’s largest ratings firm, Standard & Poor’s, agreed to pay $1.375 billion in 2015 for its part in the 2008 financial crisis. (REUTERS, FORTUNE)

According to a 2015 report by the National Cooperative Highway Research Program, cities and counties in at least 27 states have converted 550 miles of paved roads to dirt roads, either by actively tearing up the pavement and combining it with gravel and other products or by allowing it to deteriorate to an unpaved surface on its own.

Laura Fay, a researcher at Montana State University’s Western Transportation Institute who co-authored the report, said such deconstructed roads require regular grading, dust control and other maintenance.

“There’s cost and there’s maintenance required,” she said. “No one wants to drive on an unsafe road, and no county wants people to drive on an unsafe road.”

But the roads are also generally a lot cheaper to install and maintain than paved ones. Brian Ridenour, engineer for Allamakee County, Iowa told the Minneapolis Star-Tribune in 2011 that resurfacing a paved road cost about $100,000 per mile, while tearing up “a thinly paved road” and adding some gravel only cost about $5,000 per mile. And Thomas McArdle, public works director for Montpelier, Vermont, said converting just over a mile of that city’s paved streets was projected to cut the costs of maintaining those roads by at least half over the next 20 years.

Not everyone approves of such conversions, however. After a quarter-mile, dead-end stretch of South 113th Street in Omaha, Nebraska was converted to a dirt road early last year, unhappy residents banded together to pay half the cost of having it repaved.

Poorly maintained dirt roads in isolated, rural areas can also make them inaccessible to public vehicles.

“We get that story every now and then,” said Jason Autrey, public works director for Okaloosa County, Florida. “School buses can’t come down here, ambulance gets stuck, we can’t get services or the trash truck won’t come. Those kinds of things.”

Autrey said the county’s 200 miles of unpaved roads are mostly old private farm roads and livestock paths that have gradually been taken over by the county.

“We just can’t improve 200 miles in a year,” he said. “In fact, we can’t do 200 miles in 50 years. It just financially doesn’t work out for us.”

As Robert McFee, who heads the engineering and infrastructure department in affluent Beaufort County, South Carolina, which hasn’t converted any of its paved roads to dirt, put it, “There’s a reason you see jurisdictions going from a paved road to a gravel road.”

“It’s not because they want to do it, it’s because they have to do it,” he said. (STATELINE.ORG, STAR-TRIBUNE [MINNEAPOLIS])

In 2004 California voters approved Proposition 71, authorizing the sale of $3 billion in general obligation bonds to support human embryonic and other types of stem cell research.

“Research that we do now holds the promise of cures for tomorrow,” then-Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger (R) said in endorsing the initiative at the time.

But with less than $700 million of that initial $3 billion investment remaining, keeping the program going at its current level may require the approval of another big bond issue, especially if the Trump administration and Republican-controlled Congress cut off federal funding for embryonic stem cell research, which many conservatives oppose on religious grounds.

Obtaining approval for more borrowing could be a tall order, however. The California Institute for Regenerative Medicine (CIRM), which issues grants and loans to research facilities under the state’s program, has been dogged by conflict-of-interest concerns. According to the California Stem Cell Report, a blog that has provided news and commentary on issues related to CIRM since 2005, about 90 percent of the money the agency has awarded has gone to institutions with ties to board members of the agency.

What’s more, CIRM has little to show for the $2.2 billion it has already awarded, with stem cell therapies having proven costly, difficult to bring to market and useful for treating only a small number of diseases.

“We can help just a small portion of patients with stem cell therapy,” mainly those with diseases like Parkinson’s and diabetes that “are caused by loss of function of just one type of cell,” Nobel Prize-winning stem cell researcher Shinya Yamanaka told The New York Times this month.

John M. Simpson of the Santa Monica, California-based group Consumer Watchdog said CIRM’s main problem is that Prop. 71’s supporters “wildly oversold” it by promising miracle cures.

“CIRM-funded research has made important contributions to science, but has yet to deliver what voters were promised,” he said.

He went on to say that CIRM’s results “in no way justify another bond issue” and that the agency should only continue to be funded through the state’s normal budget process. (SACRAMENTO BEE, NEW YORK TIMES, BBC NEWS)

Thousands of Ballots Tossed in KS

Thousands of provisional ballots cast in KANSAS in November were thrown out by election officials because no registration could be found for the voters who cast them. But some local election officials are concerned that records for those who registered through the secretary of state’s website or motor vehicles offices may not have appeared on the voter rolls. (LAWRENCE JOURNAL-WORLD)

AK House Gives Speaker More Power

The ARKANSAS House passed new rules this month giving future speakers the power to make committee assignments. Previously members made those assignments, based on seniority. (ARKANSAS DEMOCRAT-GAZETTE [LITTLE ROCK])

-- Compiled by KOREY CLARK

In 2015 a grass-roots group gathered enough signatures for a public vote on raising Kansas City’s minimum wage to $15 per hour by 2020. But Judge Justine Del Muro of the 16th Circuit Court in Jackson County blocked the proposal from going on the November 2015 ballot on the grounds that a new state law prohibited the city from adopting a minimum wage higher than the state’s rate, which was $7.65 at time of her ruling. The grass-roots group appealed that decision, arguing that there were faults with the way the state’s lawmakers had drafted the minimum wage law.

Last week the state’s Supreme Court ruled that Del Muro was wrong to block Kansas City’s minimum wage vote, ruling that challenges to the proposal’s substance or effect should only be considered if and when it is approved by voters.

“If the voters approve the proposal, a party with proper standing can then sue to enjoin its operation on the ground that the ordinance is invalid,” the court said.

While that decision leaves the door open for the minimum wage increase to be struck down in the future, it means Kansas City’s voters will have their say on the issue.

“The city is ordered to take all steps necessary to have the committee’s proposed ordinance placed before city voters in accordance with the city charter,” the Supreme Court said.

The vote is expected to come in April or August. (KANSAS CITY STAR)