A glance at the law governing enforcement of municipal bond obligations suggests a possible strategy for solving the maintenance problem, one that could be developed by state and local officials, bond lawyers, and other financial professionals.

Despite the drift of political and editorial rhetoric, the solution here is probably not to increase federal spending. Rather, it probably lies in the more tedious exercise of changing state and local finance laws nationwide to give maintenance spending the same priority, the same legal protection from political plunder, as debt service. This, even though maintenance spending is usually considered part of the annual operating budget separate and distinct from payments to bondholders.

Typically, bondholders are a “permanent” minority. In James Madison’s terms, they are a “faction” of lenders, always outnumbered by the (debtor) faction of voters. If bondholders had to rely for payment on the annual budget log-roll, they would, like any other permanent minority, almost always lose. They would need constitutional safeguards or other effective protection. Indeed, it’s precisely the existence of constitutional protection — or in some cases, an equivalently sturdy economic incentive — that permits states and localities to attract long-term lenders to finance capital projects.

Throughout the late 19th and most of the 20th centuries, bondholders relied largely on the non-impairment provision of the contract clause of the Constitution (and similar interpretations of state constitutions) for protection of their interests. Courts would generally enforce debt-service payment obligations against states and localities, even in the face of periodic political decisions to the contrary.

In the late 19th century, for instance, the docket of the U.S. Supreme Court was crowded with municipal bond enforcement cases. And not too long ago, in 1977, the contract clause protected covenants barring mass transit spending by the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey in the U. S. Trust case.

For more than a century, legal enforceability induced lenders to bear political risks that could result not only in payment default but also in a covenant breach. The muni bond market flourished and grew.

More recently, as shown by the explosive growth of “subject-to-appropriation” or “back-door” credits — where a legal obligation to pay arises only after an appropriation has been made in the fiscal period when payment is due — bondholders have come to rely on the expected draconian consequences of “repudiation” by a (sovereign) state.

If a state should fail to appropriate debt service for an authorized subject-to-appropriation credit, then, for all practical purposes, the market would consider that to be a repudiation of the state’s own debt. As a result, the state would lose access to credit markets, at least until the repudiation itself was repudiated by full payment. Loss of access is an altogether unacceptable risk, one imposing essentially the same payment discipline as legal enforceability.