Opening Remarks

Transcription:

Mike Ballinger (00:09):

Good morning. I'm Mike Ballinger, publisher of the Bond Buyers. It's my pleasure to welcome you to the Bond Buyer Southeast Public Finance Conference. For those of you who've been in the industry a while, you may remember, the Bond Buyer used to co-host a National Muni Summit with the BDA in Miami and Fort Lauderdale about a decade ago. And we thought now was a good time to return to this market for this year's Southeast Public Finance Conference. We'll address key issues and trends that are impacting the municipal and southeast bond markets. We're particularly pleased that such an outstanding lineup of speakers, including our luncheon speaker, Chris Spencer, Executive Director of the State Board of Administration, executive Office of the Governor of Florida. We're also delighted to have two Frida Johnson Award winners speak at the conference. Megan Kilgore and City of Columbus, we'll be speaking at tomorrow's breakfast briefing, sponsored by Debt book, and Alyssa Wood from Miami-Dade County, who will be speaking on the port panel this afternoon. I'd like to take this opportunity to thank all of our sponsors and speakers in the conference, especially our conference co-chairs, Sean Wardlow, senior Managing Director, infrastructure and Public Finance at Siebert, William Shank, and Melissa Lopez, Rogers shareholder at Greenberg Wig.

(01:18):

I want to thank several Bon Buyer employees for outstanding work. In this conference, I'm EK or program manager responsible for developing the excellent agenda and Esther Thornton, Sarah Barringer, and Dan Hoskins, who handled all the marketing and logistics with this conference. Please join me at a round of applause for the reference.

(01:38):

The Bondard editorial staff is also well represented. This conference led by Lynn Funk and Caitlin Debit. I urge you to reach out to our editorial and conference staff during the course of the conference. Kick off the conference. It's my pleasure to introduce our conference co-chairs Melissa Lopez Rogers is a shareholder of Greenburg TIG and focuses a practice in the area of public finance with an emphasis on disclosure and municipal securities issues, economic development and public private partnerships. She has served as disclosure council, bond council, underwriters counsel, trustees counsel purchasers counsel, lenders counsel, and borrower's counsel in connection with publicly and privately offered financing in a wide array of sectors including general government, airports, higher education, community development, tax allocation districts, water, sewer, and electric utilities. Sean Werdlow is a proven finance professional and a business leader who has led multiple entities through challenging financial and economic circumstances and growth phases, achieving strong results, and creating significant value for shareholders and constituents. Sean is currently senior Managing Director and Head of the Midwest and Southeast regions for Siebert, William Shank. Sean has led over 14 billion of senior managed capital markets. Transaction has secured an additional 12 billion in co-managed deals. Previously, he was Chief financial Officer for the city of Detroit, serving this role. He was the first finance professional in the history of the city, history of city government to manage both the departments of finance and budget simultaneously. Please join me in a warm welcome for Sean and Melissa.

Sean Werdlow (03:12):

Mike. Thanks a lot. Well, good morning all and welcome to the Bond Buyer Southeast Conference. As mentioned, I'm Sean Werdlow, Senior Managing Director for Siebert and I, along with Melissa, are proud and excited to be your co-chairs for the next few days. Now, as I look at this room, I see a lot of new faces, which actually makes me feel a little bit old in this industry. But at the same time, I see a lot of familiar faces and that leads me to believe that I still have a few more years left on a useful life scale. So I'm excited about the next few days as we come together collectively and talk about issues confronting this region. If you've been to a bomb buyer conference before, the conference is always about three things. The expertise in the room, the exchange of ideas and generating ideas that are achievable and also realistic. So that's going to be the focus for the next day and a half. And Mike told me that if I was up here for longer than two minutes and I was speaking for two long, so let's get ready to introduce the first panel and that's on market outlook and issuance expectations and the road ahead. So with that, let's get it going.