Moody's Investors Service, which had threatened downgrades if Proposition 30 was voted down, says voters' approval of the tax initiative is good news for the credit ratings of California's K-12 districts and colleges.
Gov. Jerry Brown and state lawmakers enacted a budget in June that put education funding at risk this year if voters had rejected the measure.
"Passage of this proposition is credit positive for the state's K-12 school districts, community college districts and university systems because it averts the state executing a $6 billion, mid-year cut to education funding," Moody's wrote in its report Thursday.
Moody's observed that K-12 funding for the current school year will now remain about the same as last year. The ratings agency embraced Brown's plan to use extra cash to begin reversing delayed payments, which had forced districts to borrow to pay their bills on an annual basis.
The agency said that in the coming years, Proposition 30 "could provide districts with more revenues, assuming economic growth and taxable income rise above our current expectations."
Ratings house Standard & Poor's has also called the initiative's passage a positive development for the state's credit rating as a whole.
ELECTION WATCH
California's elections officials had tallied more than 9.9 million votes by late Friday afternoon, but they still have their work cut out. About 3.3 million vote-by-mail and provisional ballots were left to process late Friday, according to information that officials supplied to the secretary of state's office. Los Angeles County alone had about 796,000 to go.
WORTH REPEATING
"Only a decade ago served as a student-government rep at the University of Maryland. Eric Swalwell (D-Calif.) will have the most enviable business card at his 10-year reunion."
ROXANNE ROBERTS and AMY ARGETSINGER, of the Washington Post's Reliable Source, dishing on who they believe are the 12 "most-promising-to-be- interesting new members" of Congress. Swalwell, 31, beat Democratic Rep. Pete Stark, 81, in the 15th Congressional District.
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