Transcription:
Michael Ballinger (
Good morning. It is a pleasure to welcome you to the Bond Buyers Inaugural Infrastructure Conference. This infrastructure conference will discuss the critical issues surrounding the rapid changes associated with the Infrastructure Act. As state and local governments are applying infrastructure, investment and job Acts funds, many are planning are beginning to plan for new projects across the country and challenges abound as inflation is increasing construction costs. While this conference will address key issues that are transforming the Muni and P3 markets to address our country is growing infrastructure needs, It will also mark the seventh year of our Rising Stars program and the first year of our Bond Buyers Hall of Fame honoree dinner tomorrow night. We are very pleased. Have such an outstanding lineup of speaker is delight to have such keynotes as Mitch Landrieu, Senior Advisor to the President and Infrastructure Implementation Coordinator, Dr. Morteza Farajian, Executive Director of Build America Bureau and Jessica Matthews, Founder and CEO of Uncharted. I would like to take this opportunity to thank all of our sponsors for the conference and speakers, particularly our conference chair, Christine Reynolds from Orrick Herrinton and Sutcliffe, who is very instrumental helping us put together such a strong program agenda. Also take this opportunity to thank all the Bond Buyer employees for outstanding work in this conference, particularly Alma Subasic, Dan Hoskins, and Sarah Barringer who have handled all the speaker coordination agenda and market logistics with event. Please join me at a round of applause for the efforts.
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The Bond Buyer editorial team is also well represented today, led by Mike Scarchilli, editor in chief, along with Kyle Glazier, Caitlin Devitt and Scott Sowers. I You can cheer for them too. That is good.
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I heard you to reach out to our conference editorial teams during the course of the conference. Kick out the conference. My pleasure to introduce our conference chair, Christine Reynolds, a partner of Orrick Herrington and Sutcliffe for the public finance department. She has broad experiences, bond council disclosure council, underwritings council, borrowers Council across a wide range of public finance sectors. Christine's expertise includes various general obligation and revenue bond financings, including those related transportation, education, healthcare, water, wastewater, urban renewal, public power and other infrastructure financings. Christine is a frequent speaker at conferences and seminars given by trade and professional organizations within the Muni finance industry. Please join me in a warm welcome for Christine Reynolds.
Christine Reynolds (
Good morning. It is wonderful to see everyone here, although quite honestly, I am blinded by the lights, so trust me, I believe you are out there laugh, cheer. It is good to see you. On behalf of our public Finance and Infrastructure Teams, we are really proud to be here as sponsors of this conference and really wanna thank our partners of the bond buyer for putting this together and working as a team to hopefully put together a great conference experience for you all over the next two days. We are looking forward to learning from many clients, colleagues and friends about the complexities and opportunities ahead for infrastructure. So you are going to hear that word a lot. Infrastructure, what is it? If you type the question, so what is infrastructure into Google? You get about 1.45 billion results kind of fitting, given the size and scale of infrastructure finance, but that first result is a definition, infrastructure noun, the basic physical and organizational structures and facilities, eg.
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Buildings, roads, power, supplies needed for the operation of a society or enterprise. If you dig a little deeper into the results, you get down to the dictionary definition for Miriam Webster and they provide a helpful explanation that infra means below and that infrastructure is the underlying structure of a country and its economy. The fixed installations that are necessary in order to function. The definition includes examples of infrastructure, including roads, bridges, dams, water and sewer systems, railways, subways, airports and harbors. Finally, the dictionary states that infrastructure is generally government built and publicly owned. When friends ask what I do as a bond lawyer, I turn to many of those same examples to talk about the projects and clients that I work with. Roads, bridges, airports, electric utilities, water, sewer. I also include hospitals and school buildings as critical parts of how we function and operate and what our clients are looking for us.
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We are all privileged to work on a number of public infrastructure projects, helping to develop, finance, operate, and maintain the core structures of our communities. Over the next two days that we are together, we are going to move beyond these generalities and explore the future of infrastructure and opportunities for innovation and transformation. We will hear from issuers that are developing and implementing capital improvement programs to modernize our existing 19th and 20th century infrastructures and move us into the 21st century. We will learn about exciting innovations, including the smart city street lighting program right here in DC and cutting edge renewable power technology being developed by uncharted to harness and store energy and put it into everything that moves. It's been a good couple of years for infrastructure here in DC thanks to the new federal legislation, including the Infrastructure Act and the Inflation Reduction Act.
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There is lots to do. We will hear more about both of these new programs and have an opportunity to get some insights on what might be coming during the lame duck session of Congress. Will they or will not they fix the Babs subsidies sequestration problem and we will dig into P three opportunities, including hearing about the latest deals in emerging trends and structures such as energy as a service transactions which provide a pay for performance off balance sheet financing solution that allows customers to implement energy and water efficiency projects with no upfront capital expenditures. I am really grateful to be here with all of you today in real life. After two years of responding to the Covid Pandemic, it is really wonderful to reconnect in person. We have gathered all of these experts from the traditional municipal market as well as the P three and alternative to delivery space together to connect and build opportunities for financing infrastructure projects together as a greater and stronger community. Please be sure to take that leap, sit down next to somebody you do not know and introduce yourself and develop some deeper connections. Have a great time together here in DC. Thank you for coming and I look forward to meeting many of you over the next two days.