Betsy Taylor, the director of finance and treasury at the Massachusetts Port Authority and its longtime point person on bond deals, is retiring this week after 37 years with the quasi-public agency.
Taylor, who began with Boston-based Massport in 1978, has generated respect throughout the capital markets for her diligence and knack for detail.
Massport, which Taylor described as "wonderfully complex," owns and operates Logan International Airport in Boston, the Hanscom Field airport in Bedford, and Worcester Regional Airport, as well as the Port of Boston and waterfront development properties with $623 million in operating revenues and $5.2 billion in capital assets.
"My talents were management talents and the use of facts," Taylor said in an interview. "I stayed on the public finance side of public administration. I like order. I'm not a politician, so I stayed away from the marketing and political side."
Taylor began with Massport in 1978 as budget and finance director after working at Lesley College, Smith College and the University of Massachusetts-Boston in various roles. When graduated from Oberlin College in Ohio in 1969, public finance seemed more attractive to young graduates.
"The dreaded private sector was not looked at favorably by students at the time," said Taylor, who earned a master's degree from Stanford University in 1976. Taylor's titles at Massport included director of financial policy and director of finance before she assumed her current role in 2006.
Under Taylor's watch, Massport issued $3.5 billion in new money and refunding double-A rated airport bonds and $1.6 billion in passenger facility charge, car rental facility and special-facility bonds. It also gained Federal Aviation Administration approval to collect and use $1.5 billion in passenger facility charges at Logan, New England's largest transportation center.
"Betsy Taylor epitomizes the best in public service,'' said Massport chief executive Thomas Glynn. "She is intelligent, creative, dedicated and a wonderful person. Massport and the people who use the runways and terminals at [Logan], and the businesses that rely on Conley Container Terminal to get access to the global economy have benefited from her decades of service.''
Conley Terminal, at the Port of Boston, is New England's only full-service container terminal and serves seven of the world's top 10 container lines.
Taylor also prepared the financing strategy for the authority's $2.2 billion rolling five-year capital plan and prepared reports that structured and influenced capital allocation.
She said her most memorable financing was the ConRac project in 2011, which involved negotiating and implementing a $6-per-day transaction fee for rental car customers and a leveraged revenue stream to issue $214 million in revenue bonds in 2011 that financed a $310 million rental car facility, also at Logan.
It was Massport's first taxable new-money deal ever.
"It was hard to negotiate because you had many rental companies, all with different business plans. The number of players made it difficult," she said.
"It involved a large structure and a design that had to fit the community [the city's East Boston neighborhood]. We were bringing the first taxable municipal deal in 18 months without any good sense of the interest rates. But the market knows a good deal when it sees one."
Taylor also ran point for two major issues after Sept. 11, 2001.
In May 2003, Massport re-entered the bond market after the terrorist attacks with a $388 million funding that financed $254 million in construction and refunded bonds that generated $800,000 in annual savings. Two years later, its $454 million deal funded $200 million in construction with a mix of fixed-rate and auction-rate securities, and refunded prior debt for annual savings of $625,000.
The Bond Buyer and Northeast Women in Public Finance honored Taylor in 2011 as a trailblazer. She was also elected a member of the Massport Employee Retirement System in 2013.
Taylor cites two people who inspired her: Dave Davis, Massport's executive director from 1975 to 1990, and Larry Bragg, former bond counsel at law firm Ropes & Gray LLP.
"He thoroughly embraced the contradictory goals of the organization," she said of Davis, who was Massport's executive director from 1975 until 1990 and died in 2012. "He listened to different sides and encouraged staff to present different viewpoints. He saw everybody - the janitor, the secretary to the executive director, whatever - as valuable."
Bragg, who died in 2011, headed the public finance group at Ropes & Gray, where he worked for 31 years. He advised public agencies on the financing aspects of such endeavors as the Big Dig megaproject, formally the Central Artery/Tunnel Project. "He was without a doubt the most respected and probably the smartest," said Taylor. "He was able to take the long-term view."
Massport's near-term challenge, she said, is to effective manage growth of the airports and seaports. She advises younger people considering careers in public finance to assess their talents and decide accordingly.
After a summer of gardening work, Taylor, who lives in Boston's Needham suburb, intends to speak to students about financial literacy.
"Our junior high and high school students are not getting a good financial education," she said. "I've spent a career trying to explain complex financial terms to non-financial people, and now I'll teach them to students."
