(Reuters) - U.S. voters gave the green light on Tuesday to the sale of $18.9 billion or 81.6 percent of the about $23 billion of bonds cities, schools, parks and other issuers in the municipal debt market placed on ballots, according to results on Thursday compiled by data company Ipreo.
Nearly $3.2 billion of proposed bond issuance was rejected by voters while election results for about $1 billion of bond issues were still pending, Ipreo data showed.
Chris Mier, a muni analyst at Loop Capital Markets, said while the approval rate was a little higher than in recent years, the amount of bonds put up for voter approval has been dropping from a peak of over $100 billion in 2006.
The biggest issue winning approval was $1.6 billion of bonds for the Dallas Independent School District, while the biggest single referendum to lose was $287 million of bonds for a courthouse project in Travis County, Texas. Voters in Arizona's Pima County rejected seven bond referendums totaling $815.7 million.
Issuance of muni bonds in 2015 totaled $332.5 billion as of the end of October, up 32.9 percent from the same period in 2014, according to Thomson Reuters data.