I don't know the specifics, but I would bet that the SEC (and probably other federal agencies) had to approve the auction, and investment bankers have lots of say over what happens with the SEC.
But the SEC did approve the 1997 auction. Maybe it was very difficult for this company to enter the market back then. Maybe it would be very difficult for a new company to enter this market. But that is not the topic. The topic is municipal bonds taking advantage of the options that are available, the options that have already passed regulatory hurdles.
Recently I talked with a guy from Grant Street Group. They make, among other things, software with which local governments can auction their bonds on the Internet.
By making the auction process more transparent and easier to participate in, they enable local governments which need to sell bonds (to build a high school, for instance), to sell those bonds at, say, 7% interest instead of 8%. (At least, that's what he said.)
They have similar software for auctioning liens on property taxes, which also helps local governments raise more money by bringing more buyers to each auction, and probably helps the buyers reduce their risks by giving them more information.
This is a big deal. I think it's potentially more important than any budget argument that's been on the front pages since the 1960s. Yet I only heard of it by chance.
People would rather argue about reducing the budget by eliminating waste, or cutting subsidies to people who don't deserve it, or changing our ideological priorities. Nobody wants to talk about auction mechanics. But fixing the auction mechanics is the easy win. It's so easy that nobody's interested in it. It doesn't buy us fuzzies or let us signal our affiliations. To an individual activist, it's hardly worth doing.