Opening Remarks

Introductory remarks will be provided by the Bond Buyer and conference chairs.


Transcription:

Michael Ballinger (00:10):

Good afternoon. There we go. I'm Mike Ballinger, publisher of the Bond Buyer. My pleasure to welcome you to our 34th annual California Public Finance Conference. We're delighted you could join us for the conference. That will, again, focus on key issues facing the industry on both California specific and national levels. It's also great to see so many familiar faces here today. I'd like to take this opportunity to thank all of our sponsors and speakers of this conference, particularly our conference co-chairs Andy Nakahata from TD Securities and Chas Cardall from Orrick, Herrington & Sutcliffe. Together with our focus group, Andy and Chas were very instrumental in helping put together such a strong program agenda. We're delighted to have such a strong roster of speakers this year, including such keynotes as Fiona Ma, California State Treasurer, Nathan Brostrom, Executive Vice President, Chief Financial Officer, University of California, and Dave Sanchez, Director of Office of Municipal Securities, the SEC. In this, as many of the outstanding panels, I'm particularly looking forward to RBCs breakfast briefing tomorrow 2024 fall elections, the potential impact on state and local governments. I want to take this opportunity to thank all the Bond Buyer employees for outstanding work in this conference. Lynne Funk, Alma Subasik, Dave Hoskins, Esther Thornton, and Sarah Barringer for handling all the speaker coordination, marketing, and logistics for the conference. Please join me a round of applause for their efforts.

(01:38):

The Bond Buyer editorial team is also well represented here, led by Mike Scarchilli, editor in chief and joined by Lynne Funk, Keeley Webster and Rich Saskal for at the conference. It's my pleasure to introduce our conference co-chairs. Jazz is a tax and public finance partner in San Francisco office. Chas was Chair of Orrick tax practice from 2015 to 2022. His primary focus focuses his practice on municipal finance, tax and nonprofit nonprofit corporate tax matters. Most recently, Chas has been spending most of his personal time working on tax exempt public finance, public private partnership financing, pool financing, project financings and nonprofit and specialized government entities and financing for charter school projects. Andy Nakahata is Director and Head of Western region for TD Securities. Andy has 30 years of public finance experience across several firms in the roles of municipal bond industry, and Andy assists clients in executing a range of financing projects and structures such as fixed rate bonds, floating rate bonds, current interest rate, capital appreciation bonds, trans bands, and commercial paper. Andy has worked in a variety of sectors including state and local governments, higher education, healthcare, non-for-profit, 5 0 1 C3 s, and public utilities. Andy is a founding board member and continues to serve on the board of the Asian American Public Finance. Please join me in a warm welcome for Andy Nakahata.

Andy Nakahata (03:02):

So Mike was smarter than me. His font was a lot bigger than mine here, so thank you Mike. On behalf of TD Securities and TD Bank, welcome to the 34th annual California Bond Buyer Conference. I'm honored to be here representing TD as co-sponsor of this year's conference. This year, TD has expanded opening a California public finance office, which allows us to better provide a full range of services to our California based clients. It's first of all, just great to have the conference back here in San Francisco for the second year in a row. Thank you, Mike. It's my pleasure to co-chair this conference with my longtime friend and colleague, Chas. Not to sound too old, but I first had the opportunity to work with Chas in 1995 on the Orange County bankruptcy recovery financings at the time. I remember some what I thought were then old now that I think they're probably young bankers telling me about bonds that they had financed and that had been refunded several times and had matured.

(04:02):

And this year now remarks the 30th anniversary of Orange County's bankruptcy. And not only has the bankruptcy debt all been repaid, but the county has returned now to AAA ratings. So first of all, congratulations to the county and to Louis McClure, who I believe should be here somewhere in the audience. But in thinking about the fact that this is the 34th California Bond Buyer conference, it made me wonder what conference attendees were thinking and talking about 34 years ago on October 23rd, 1990. So I took a look at the San Francisco Chronicle and I found several similar topics to what we're talking about today. So here we have ripped from the 1990 headlines. First of all, there were housing issues, not surprisingly San, here's the headline. San Mateo County offers home loans, and it was an innovative program they had at the time to help workers with down payments.

(04:56):

It was an early and creative workforce housing initiative that the county was using to attract and keep workers retail demand. Here's another headline, rush to buy College Bonds. States sells 76 million. First of all, Nathan, 76, they're missing a zero there, 76 million worth in half an hour to benefit UC. California's first bond issue designed to help parents and grandparents answer a college education. That's not going to go far now anymore, but they sold out quickly with so much demand that the state plans to repeat the sale early next year. Airports, we'll be hearing shortly from Rhonda Chu, but United Buys Pan AM's SFO assets. European routes also included in $400 million deal. The deal will add substantially to United Hub in San Francisco International where it is the dominant airline. I'm hoping Rhonda will talk more about the headline that I read in today's Chronicle about the really bouncy escalator or walkways, which are apparently being removed, and I'm sure that's part of the capital program she'll talk about.

(06:01):

Then there was underwriting firms. Again, I was amazed that this was all in the Chronicle that day, but the headline, there was B of A hopes to follow Morgan into investment banking field. Bank of America said yesterday, it wants to follow the lead of JP Morgan and company to engage in investment banking activities have been off limits to commercial banks for seven years. Interesting to note that those firms, which were new entrants at the time and contemplating entry into the market are near and at the top of the league tables. And then coming back to Dear UC, the best headline that I read was Cal Ren Game Good as Glory Days. It's no accident that Cal is running the ball so well this year and winning. I'm hoping Nathan will get a little more into that. So in terms of our conference, we'll start by hearing from Nathan in a few minutes.

(06:47):

Well, bill does the discussion of some of his compelling issues in higher education. I hope he'll touch on Kyle's running game, which actually has been surprisingly good in the absence of OTT. We move on to the State of the Union. We continue to see firms thinking and expanding about public finance, and it's interesting to note just how the landscape has changed with new entrants and a much more just diversified group of firms that we see around the room. Shortly we'll hear about Rhonda from Rhonda Chu about SFO, and she'll tell us more about their infrastructure investments, and I'm hoping about the bouncy walkways, which are going away. But well, yesterday's headline remained very much in today's topics. We also look forward to new and exciting discussions over the next three days on the topics that they'll be talking about in another 34 years. So with that, I'd like to turn the podium over to my co-chair, Chas.

Chas Cardall (07:52):

So my font is big, but you all have a problem in that I'm a tax lawyer, so forgive me. So let me reiterate a little bit of what Andy said. Welcome to the conference. I can't squint quite well enough, but there are a lot of, they seem to be partially familiar faces out there, so that part's really good. I'm Chas Cardall and I am a tax lawyer. As we were saying at oric, like a lot of your organizations or it's been around doing public finance for a long time, and there are a bunch of us here at the conference that are attending. So there's a good chance a lot of, some of us or some of our colleagues, please feel free. One of the great things about a conference like this is you get a chance to see people you otherwise wouldn't get to see.

(08:52):

Maybe we don't get out of the office as anymore as we used to, so please come up and say hello. Or if you don't know us, but you want to say hello, come up and introduce yourself. That would be a great thing if we can make some connections here. Municipal finance goes through cycles, interest rates, enforcement regimes, different sorts of market changes, politics, we innovate and we adapt and we collaborate. That's sort of the DNA or the culture of what this industry is. You think back doing things for 30 years and still working together and being able to smile about what we were doing back then. Maybe it's my own personal anxiety because of the looming election, but one of the things that I was thinking about in sort of preparing for this is there's something about our industry, kind of a collective experience maybe, that we all have. We're a place, the municipal finance industry is a place that finds solutions to real world problems, local government, real world kind of problems. When things are working well, when we're doing our job well, we're actually impacting people's lives in a positive way. And I just think everybody in this room needs to remember that. That kind of keeps me going at times where I'm feeling a little less hopeful, shall we say.

(10:44):

And the other part to that is we may know that, but a lot of other people don't know that. So we are our little, well, I shouldn't say a lot of other people. We tell our kids in our family, but I'm not assuming that they remember, right? That's one of the issues. Anyways, Andy advised me to say something pithy, and that's kind of tough, but maybe it was my early flight this morning. All I could really come up with were my favorite kind of bumper sticker slogans. So I kind of started with, again, kind of election in my mind, one of my favorites, where am I going and why am I in this hand basket? People get that one. Do you know the hell in a hand basket thing? Anyways, but I figured that was too pessimistic. So kind of aiming more on the optimistic side. My current favorite favorite, which seems particularly fitting for a California conference, is you can't stop the waves. You can learn how to surf. So we may be in for a time of change. We may see a lot of tax law changes potentially in the next year. It's hard to know what we're going to face. We'll be talking about some of that in the next couple of days, but it does seem like surf's up. So with that, please enjoy walking around and talking to people.