What muni issuers want from their deal teams — and what they don't

Transcription:

Transcripts are generated using a combination of speech recognition software and human transcribers, and may contain errors. Please check the corresponding audio for the authoritative record.

Michael Scarchilli (00:04):

Hi everyone and welcome to the Bond Buyer podcast, your essential resource for insights into the world of public finance and municipal market strategy. I’m Mike Scarchilli, editor-in-chief of the Bond Buyer, and in this episode we take you back a few weeks to the Bomb Buyer’s Southeast Public Finance Conference in Atlanta for a special panel discussion titled What an Issuer Wants. Moderated by David Moffitt, managing Director at Oppenheim Meco. The panel features Mohamed Bala, chief Financial Officer of the City of Atlanta, Matthew Haste and Treasurer of the City of Charlotte, Sharon Ick, assistant treasurer, metropolitan Government of Nashville and Davidson County, Susan Franklin Wilhelm, assistant Finance Director of the State of Alabama and Charlie Yen, senior associate of the Florida Division of Bond Finance. These leading public sector finance officials share what they value most and least in their deal teams, how they manage investor and rating agency relationships and how they’re leveraging technology and transparency to improve efficiency, tell their credit stories in a fast changing market. Let’s get into it.

David G. Moffett (01:15):

Excited about the Southeast Public Finance Conference here in Atlanta, which is my hometown and excited about the panelists we have here. I feel like we’ve got the north covered with Nashville of the southeast region, the south with Florida, the east with Charlotte, the west with Alabama, and right in the center is the city of Atlanta. So I’m excited about this panel and I wanted to go down the line here and have each of you guys introduce yourselves and share with the group sort of an icebreaker question that I stole from the Texas Bomb Buyer Conference, which is how much of your time with all the other responsibilities you have, managing people, cash, man, all the other responsibilities, how much time do you really spend on the bond issuance process that of course a lot of people in this room are focused on over a hundred percent of their time and also whether you enjoy the bond issuance process or you endure the mon issuance process. So with that, why don’t you start off Matt?

Matthew Hastedt (02:35):

Alright, so Matt Hastedt, city of Treasurer and deputy finance director for City of Charlotte. I do enjoy the process for debt issuance. I’d probably say at least 60 to 70% of my time is spend on bond issuance. Part of that is in North Carolina. The debt issuance process is pretty long having to go through the state treasurer’s office, but I’m also very involved in determining what our affordability is for a lot of our larger hospitality projects and our general obligation programs. I spend a lot of time on the front end as well as the actual debt issuance part.

Sharon Sepik (03:09):

Sharon Sepik, assistant treasurer for Nashville. I enjoy the bond issuing process as far as time spent. I manage four different teams within the treasury division, so it depends on who’s got the biggest project going on. So when we issue debt, I’m pretty involved in that and probably spend 50 to 60% of my time on that When we’re not issuing, I’m probably split 25% on each team.

Mohamed Balla (03:42):

Mohamed Balla, city of Atlanta, chief financial Officer. I would say in addition to a 3 billion operating budget that we have to manage working on everything from payroll to accounts payable to year end closeout budget season, which we’re in the middle of right now, have to run back to a finance exec meeting that I have the staff, the CFO for the city is also responsible as a fiduciary for our employee pension plan. On top of that, I think I probably spend about 10% of our time on this is just because Atlanta’s so massive with all our commitments from the CFO’s office. But the good thing is that we do have a centralized debt and investment team that really spends the primary bulk of their time and keeps the C FFO abreast and I see Courtney Knight here and Karen Carter here as well and they do such a good job of keeping us up to speed. What was the question that endure it,

David G. Moffett (04:59):

Whether you endure the process or enjoy the process?

Mohamed Balla (05:03):

No, I enjoy it. I enjoy it. So I have a former investment banking background, so this is a time when I get to lean in on that part of my career journey more and I have a really good team that works with us to get some very sophisticated things that we were able to do over the last couple of years. So I enjoy it a lot, but some of it is enduring, not looking at the lawyers, but they keep us honest.

Charlie Yadon (05:35):

I’m Charlie Yadon, senior associate with the Florida Division of Bond Finance. We’re a centralized debt management office for the entire state. So I’d say my job is about 50% debt issuance, 50% debt management, 25% other random debt questions. Don’t check my math on that given that basically all we do is that I generally enjoy it, but it kind of varies transaction by transaction I think, and it’s sort of a catch 22, the more intellectually interesting deals to work on are often the harder deals to get done. We do mostly competitive when you switch and negotiated. Those are really interesting from my perspective because it’s out of the norm, but then you deal with managing the entire working group, keeping the deal on track and generally we’re doing bigger deals negotiated and so you’re managing the entire pricing process, but all that’s enjoyable, it’s just more challenging.

Susan Franklin Wilhelm (06:29):

Good morning. Susan Wilhelm from the state of Alabama for the second part of your question. I enjoy the process largely because we’re able to see on the backside what we’ve done, what we’ve resolved, whether it’s a new elementary school or a bridge or a hospital or an economic development project. So it’s very rewarding. The work is as far as the time, the finance department similar to Mohammad’s discussion is we’re the administrative agency of state government, so our responsibilities, our portfolio is very broad, so if we are in maintenance period, it might be as few as a couple or few hours a week in the debt process. If we’re in the run up to a deal or to closing, then that’s going to obviously ramp up to a couple or few hours a day and then as we’re in pricing, it’s going to be all day every day.

David G. Moffett (07:19):

No, thank you all for that. And just diving in here, and I know a lot of you guys have had experience with a number of different processes in and around the bond issuance process over that period of time. What examples could you point to of things that have made the process more efficient that may have led to the more enjoyment compared to say 20 years ago when there was a lot more paper involved, cards that you had to cart across town, time spent at the printers playing pool and things of that nature. Any examples come to mind?

Matthew Hastedt (08:06):

I think one thing that I can think of is that we’ve had a pretty stable buying council and underwriter’s council on a lot of our transactions and really one of the things that’s really important to Charlotte is creating strong relationships with our underwriters, underwriter’s council and buying council is making sure that there’s really good communication between everyone. So even while we’ve had some change over a staff, sometimes our buying council will help serve as our institutional knowledge so that way we can make sure that we’re not forgetting anything. So document creation has been a little bit easier in that way at times,

David G. Moffett (08:37):

Almost an extension of staff. Yeah,

Mohamed Balla (08:42):

I think just since I’ve been at the city, one of the things that’s really been helpful is technology has really helped improve the process along the way from our ability to just jump on quick teams calls and edit things, live together and look at things. I want to give a shout out to our disclosure council as well who came up with a very good process along the way of tracking deal by deal, all the things that need to be addressed or discussed and things that we might’ve promised on the last deal that’ll be done by this deal and they give us a heads up along the journey to make sure that those things are still outstanding and need to be completed.

Susan Franklin Wilhelm (09:27):

I would agree. I think the biggest benefit we’ve seen is the onset of modern communications. Being able to get on a team’s call really quickly and pass information around back and forth not, I mean I remember the days of standing over a fax machine and counting pages as they come out and realizing you’re missing too, email, PDFs, everything. That’s been a huge improvement.

Sharon Sepik (09:52):

We have a really good team, internal and external. We have disclosure council, we have a good relationship with our municipal advisor, bond council, underwriter council. It’s a good collaborative effort and they definitely, the municipal advisor definitely creates a very rigid schedule and we have regular meetings again by video conference and we’re updating things live, so it’s very efficient

Charlie Yadon (10:22):

And from my perspective, one of the big ones, and I mean unis are far from the only thing, but just it is the document creation. The POS process mean just the cost savings of, we used to print 300 to 500 copies of an FOS every deal and if you looked at you’re doing 20 deals a year, that ends up being a real cost that we’ve gotten away from. And then also just the commenting back and forth. I mean there’s still some holdouts in the legal community that will give you scanned handwritten comments on an os, but for the most part now it’s much easier to follow changes from the working group all in track changes, all in Word and it just makes the process much more efficient and easier to follow.

David G. Moffett (11:00):

No, that’s helpful and I’d be amiss if I didn’t ask how you guys have either started using AI or intend to use AI in the sort of day-to-day jobs that y’all are in.

Susan Franklin Wilhelm (11:18):

I’ll go first. We have not started, but we are very interested and so if anybody has any tips, good ideas, please Sharon,

Charlie Yadon (11:27):

We’d be somewhat interested. But our IT department has blocked all of them and it’ll take some, we’ll run about 10 years behind general acceptance before they unblock ’em. So we’ll see. I think the main thing we’ve used it for is some reference letters. It gives you a good first draft of some formulaic, stuff like that. But as far as actual bond disclosure, very sparingly. Partially I can’t do it on my work computer at all

Mohamed Balla (11:52):

For the city. We’ve started to kind of integrate a little bit of AI into just our daily processes. So we coordinated with Microsoft copilot to help Elise with Outlook and making sure that I get reminded that somebody wants to meet for lunch with regards to things that are happening at the city, but it really catalogs all the emails and gives you assistance in making sure that you communicate back it drafts email templates to use. So that’s been helpful. One of the other areas that we’re looking into for AI’s, not for issuance perspectives but from some of the other work we do at the city, there’s a lot of generative AI work that can unlock a lot of value for cities that can unlock some revenue potential. And so there’s some companies that are in the cutting edge of helping municipalities unlock hidden revenue streams and so we’ve met with a couple of them that seem very promising.

Sharon Sepik (12:55):

As far as the debt issuance process goes, we do not use ai. I pretty much use AI on a regular basis pretty much daily just for routine things. We are contemplating a product called canoe for our pension stuff dealing with side letters, which is off topic, but that’s something that we’re thinking about and our IT department is rolling out copilot so I can’t wait for that

Matthew Hastedt (13:24):

Think for similar, it’s on the debt side pretty minimal. I think our IT department is pretty open to AI but kind of slow playing it. I think a lot of people are right now. I think that it’s probably going to be for a lot of us, a lot of background things and ERP systems for reconciliation and other things that we may not even know what AI is doing for us, but it sort of end some of those solutions. We’re going through a big ERP implementation right now, so I’m hoping that we get some of those efficiencies on those types of things in the next six to nine months.

David G. Moffett (13:54):

Great. So moving on to some of the things as our panel is entitled here, what an issuer wants and that begs, so what does an issuer want to see more of? And then the other side of that, what does an issuer want to see less of in terms of their deal teams? And that stretches from staff to our attorneys, municipal advisors, underwriters would be interested in examples of where you have seen different deal team members supporting a transaction and some activities that you really don’t see as or maybe less supportive if we’re not going to go pure negative here. I’ll just put that out there and see if there are examples of things you want to see more of. And the other side of that is things that you’d like to see less of.

Sharon Sepik (15:03):

I can go on the one thing that I would like to see less of, we had a deal in 23 that was a very complicated deal. I had three different parties involved because we were funding for a stadium and we as the actual team that works on and pays and collects the revenues that would go for making the payments on this debt issuance, knew how the taxes were collected and there’s a delay in receiving the money, it goes to the state and then it comes to us. So it’s like a two month delay and we were pushing for a payment date of eight one and what is that eight, one and 3 1, 2 1, I don’t remember but eight one and three one I think two one, okay. And the underwriter said that it was easier for them to sell bonds that had a seven one and a 12 one and they didn’t listen to us at all. So that was kind of a little off-putting when they said we don’t really care about what you need from a cashflow perspective, it’s easier for us to sell those bonds. So hope I never receive answers like that again.

Charlie Yadon (16:17):

Any other examples that can go? One thing I’d like to see less of preferably not even know they exist is underwriter compliance departments. I know that’s not in there, our bankers can’t really do anything about that, but one thing we try and do is extract as much value as we can from the full deal team. I know typically when we’re doing a negotiated sale, the recent ones we’ve done are just a senior manager and a couple of co-signs and what we try and avoid is the group thing because you get ’em all on a phone call giving you pricing views or whatever and they’re all going to fall in line with a senior manager. So we’ll go out of our way to have one-on-one calls with the desks of each firm to get sort of a more unbiased view of what they’re seeing in the transaction.

(17:04):

I think that’s added a lot of value. And then the other thing from a disclosure perspective, and we do on our competitive deals, basically have in-house disclosure counsel, but we try and we push our internal lawyers and we try and do it on external disclosure counsel when we do a negotiated sale to really focus on putting the official statement in plain English. I think a lot of the lawyers are almost afraid to, they just want to copy and paste the terms directly from the resolution or the indenture into the front section of the os and that’s not adding any value, especially the more complicated deals where you want an investor be able pick this up and understand, okay, the indenture is in that it’s an appendix. If they wanted to go read that language word for word, they can go do it, but putting in language they can really quickly pick up the important details of the transaction.

Susan Franklin Wilhelm (17:51):

I’ll echo that. We’ve been very fortunate to have excellent teams working with us on deals, so I don’t necessarily think that we need to see more of anything because they’ve been proactive in their support and just right there when we’ve needed them to help us on the less of category. That would probably be rather say less of me, but again, appreciate their patience and their support as we’re going through.

Matthew Hastedt (18:17):

I’d say for Charlotte, I think one of the things I think I mentioned a little bit ago sort of relationship. I think for me it’s a lot of getting in and understanding what the actual needs of the city is or are because we have a, an airport, a water sewer utility that’s countywide hospitality projects. We have a lot of things that are happening at any given time. So it’s understanding the full breadth of what we want and need to balance all the different credit considerations where the considerations, one of the things that on the flip side that I don’t need are number runs. I don’t need to get a number run just to get a sake of a number run. I need to have something that’s value added to help me understand when I come to market, how do I do this more efficiently, whether it’s disclosure or I mean north pretty tight on structure, but what can I do that’s going to make this transaction better?

(19:08):

Because on the best case, I’m picking a sale date 90 days out this past year I picked four negotiated sale dates in January and that’s from February through September. And those are my sale dates because of the way North Carolina works. So I need to make sure that I trust the deal team on the day to get me the best transaction I can and knowing that you’ve been there for the whole time and sort of understanding what our needs are from start to finish is really important. So I think that’s a big part of it for me at least.

Mohamed Balla (19:38):

Yeah, I mean I think for the most part our teams that we’ve constructed do a fantastic job, but I would echo just understanding the city’s landscape holistically and providing us with some strategic tools and not only helping us finance deals, but helping us kind of achieve a broader city vision that’s led by how the administration is thinking about things. How our city council is positioning the city for the next 20, 30 years. So those underpinnings of the construct of government that they’re working on, which is being more accessible, being more affordable, being more livable, being more connected, those are things that are going to stick throughout the city’s vision for the next way past the time that we’re here. And so we want teams to think like that as well.

Matthew Hastedt (20:24):

And maybe one this other thing that sort of thought of, I’m also interested in somebody who’s there for every deal, not just the big shiny deal, whether it’s a stadium or airport. I get a lot of pitches that people want to come talk about our airport, my water sea utility has more a debt outstanding than my airport does, but people don’t pay attention to that as much. So it’s people that understand the full breadth and if you’re reading in the newspaper that our city done doing something, I’ve probably been working on it for at least a year and I could have used those ideas six to nine months ago as I’m helping our city council figure out how we can do something. If you’re read in the paper, it’s probably too late to try to get to a deal team if you haven’t been there for the year ahead of time.

David G. Moffett (21:07):

How often in terms of your banking teams, and I know you guys are all large issuers with multiple credits and I would expect that you have probably more people that want to come see you with ideas, timely ideas than you can actually meet with. How would you both to MAs, to bond attorneys and to underwriters, any advice that you would give those folks in terms of appropriate interaction with the different liens?

Mohamed Balla (21:50):

Yeah, I mean for me, I think you’ve been with us for quite some time, you should understand the cadence. There’s just some times of the year where we don’t have a lot of capacity to sit down on pitches and deals. So budget season for us for example, starts in February and all the way to June and we get really busy during that time. So trying to schedule the meeting in middle or end of May is just not going to happen. But you would understood that if you kind of paid attention to how we work. Also for us audit season when we close out, we have a full plethora of things that have to get done by our controllers team and that takes a lot of time for us to reconcile and get things done. So that’s also not a good time. But also assume that what you’re pitching we’ve probably seen before, so come in with something that is unique and innovative because it is been pitched and it hasn’t been pitched, it’s already been teed up as things that we’re going to start hearing about internally because our team does a good job also of planning and knowing what is going to be needed in the future

Sharon Sepik (23:12):

As far as the broader team meeting with bankers when they come in. That again is going to be echoing Mohammed’s comments on scheduling as far as budget season and audit season goes. But the treasury team does put a priority on seeing the bankers when they come call. And so we will try to prioritize that because we know it’s important down the line. And we also know that we want you to understand our story on all sides where we issue. And the only way that happens is if we’re allowing you to come meet with us.

Matthew Hastedt (23:54):

I’d say for Charlotte, probably five years ago we had a very close system. We had probably four banks we worked with and that was it. And then probably about 20 19, 20 20 we did an underwriter RFQ pool and since then as I’ve moved into the treasury role, tried to keep a very open door. Anyone who wants to meet with, I will do my best to meet with them virtually or in person to me once a year, a book in front of me isn’t really value added. That’s great to do sort of a formal meeting once a year maybe, but sort of quarterly or some type of ongoing zoom because again, if you don’t know what our needs are, a year is going to pass and we’re already down the pipeline another year and somebody asking what deals we have in the next year and how you can try to jump on one doesn’t really help if you’re not understanding where we were and where we’re going.

Charlie Yadon (24:45):

And I’d echo Matt on that. Maybe we’re just bored and lonely in Tallahassee if there’s no high finance there outside of our office if that counts. But we’re an open door. I mean come meet with us whenever we like talking to people and to Matt’s point, the most valuable pitches we get are people who understand our thought process, understand our needs, understand what we’re looking at because then you can come in and actually discuss things that matter for us. If you come and pitch us something, that’s an idea that if you had covered us long-term and knew us was going to be a non-starter a waste of our time. But I get value I think from any pitch or at least I try and get value, even a normal refunding run, we’re running all those numbers internally for the most part and tracking all of our refunding candidates. But if nothing else, we’re estimating our own internal scales and seeing an underwriter put together a scale just as a fact check for a reality check for what we’re using internally is always helpful. So we’re happy to meet with people and again, I think not excessive amounts, but getting to a point where we have that relationship and they understand us as an issuer leads to better ultimate coverage in the long term.

Susan Franklin Wilhelm (25:57):

I would agree. We also try to have an open door policy. It might take a few minutes or a few days to get scheduled, but we are always glad to see folks coming in. One of the things that we’re always interested in is hearing what other issuers are doing, where their successes and challenges are. That helps us maybe focus on something that we’re struggling with that we haven’t talked about publicly or in a meeting. And then also too, to some extent I’m interested in hearing maybe what’s going on in other sectors, not necessarily public finance. An example is we had a banker in last week and in part of their slide deck they were talking about some things that were thought to possibly be coming in the reconciliation package and that was focusing obviously on things that would impact the states, but it was also focusing on the other sectors. Healthcare was one of them and that kicked off a conversation internally both with the bankers who were visiting but also internally in our department of how that something that doesn’t have the word Medicaid in it could affect and impact Medicaid funding in our state. So information comes in a lot of different places in a lot of different ways and we’re glad to have it. So don’t hesitate to share something even if you think it’s not super relevant. It might be,

Charlie Yadon (27:15):

I probably shouldn’t say this with a bunch of bankers in the room, but some of the best coverage we get is we pick up the phone and call the underwriter directly, especially on our competitive sales, just get their view of the market, their tone and we’re we put all our deals on 18 hour notice and maintain flexibility. And so we’re calling the active participants in the underwriting space and hearing their opinion on the market tone and whether we should hold off or pull the trigger on a deal or whatever. And that’s really good. I know for the bankers sort of going around them a little bit, but I think the ones who cover Florida are used to that. We have good relationships with the competitive underwriters at all the big firms.

David G. Moffett (27:52):

No, that’s helpful. And Muhammad, I love the way you put the C. You have to understand the cadence of an issuer and pick your spots.

(28:03):

Totally understand that. So let’s sort of switch gears and go outside of the bond issuance process. So we’re not leading up to a transaction, but we’re in either the middle of the budget season, which is obviously a busy time. One of the rating agency has a set of surveillance questions that they shoot your way. How are you dealing with those? Are you able to successfully postpone responses to those? Typically they’re on a short fuse, but I just put that out there. And in addition to the rating agencies and sort of mid year questions, also interested in how you are dealing with investor inquiries, be it they come directly to you or through your MA and how you’re responding to some of those.

Mohamed Balla (29:06):

I’ll start for the rating agencies, it’s easy. I just send it to the debt managers, please handle. And we have a good internal team that really coordinates that process for us and we have good partners that throughout the city of Atlanta that are ready to engage and answer questions as needed. It allows us to be very flexible there with the investor questions. One thing that we have to be careful about is making sure we have been coached very well. Again, by high disclosure councils, make sure that we’re not sharing any information that hasn’t been publicly disclosed before. And so we have a process in which we’ll direct those questions to where they’re already publicly available easily. And so can we use that first and if it needs a little bit more coordination, we’ll huddle up internally to make sure that we didn’t inadvertently share something that hasn’t been shared with the broader market because the answer just became available yesterday.

Susan Franklin Wilhelm (30:21):

As far as the ratings agencies, we understand that they are on a time clock when they ask us for analysis and we appreciate it’s been our experience that they understand that we’ve got to pivot to respond to those and they’re very patient with that and give us a couple of days to respond to it if it’s something quicker than the no material changes response. On the investor relations side, we interestingly do not get a lot of questions what you would think of as just kind of day-to-day investor relations questions. Ours usually pop up when we’re actually in a deal. Something related to the credit or the use of proceeds or newspaper article related to that.

Charlie Yadon (31:02):

I’d say on the ratings for us it varies by credit. For the state geo, we don’t even really notice when they’re doing the annual surveillance, having an ongoing conversation throughout the year as events arise with our state analysts. Transportation can be a little bit hit or miss, but those we can basically outsource the responses to Department of Transportation for the most part and review them. The one part of surveillance, because we issue for, I think it’s eight or nine state universities, most of them have minimum of two ratings, most have three. That’s a big process for us because we have the rating agencies. It kind of varies, but I think two out of the three prefer have an annual call with management and then that becomes just a scheduling issue with the universities want to have all these people on ’em, they have limited availability and then you have a tight timeline on a surveillance from the agency and we just end up, we’re kind of in the middle of it right now is trying to get you do the math.

(31:59):

It’s like 2025 or 27 different rating calls set up across three rating agencies and eight or nine universities. It’s a lot to manage that process and higher ed seems to want every piece of information imaginable. I guess it’s not different than most rating analysts. They want everything under the sun. And that’s one thing I was going to bring up an example of what’s not helpful from rating agency and they haven’t done it in recent hurricanes for us, but in 2017 I had just come back to the state, we had Hurricane Irma and we were getting questions about the potential impact because their insurance group had run some analysis giving speculative, oh, it’s going to be 200 billion of losses and that’s not for us. The storm hasn’t been made landfall, we’re kind of in emergency management mode at the state. We’re not going to have good information on the true impact of the storm for a month or more where we can give you relevant real information.

(32:52):

That kind of stuff is not helpful even a little bit. And I think we do, I would hope we do a good enough job outreach to investors and rating agencies. I think it was Hurricane Milton this past year we’re getting questions about the status of the Sunshine Skyway bridge and it’s like, well it didn’t fall down, you would’ve seen a headline or I hope you know that we would’ve done some proactive outreach to tell you that a bridge fell down that has debt associated with it. So stuff like that is, it’s few and far between, but it still happens a little bit on the investor in inquiry is kind of the same way we are. I mean we’re an open book. I think we’d like to have more conversations with investors than we do. I think in some regards recent years we’re kind of a victim of our own success in that regards that there’s not that many questions about Florida’s credits right now, kind of across the board.

(33:42):

But we have a few and we do an annual rating presentation for the state that we go up to New York and present to the rating agencies and we post that online and offer, if any investor wants to have a call to walk through any of those slides, we’re more than happy to. And I’d say once every four or five years, we’ll turn that into an investor road show and meet with people in Chicago or New York or Boston. So we try and be proactive, but again, we don’t get very many direct questions. Occasionally if there’s a big topic, we’ll get a few, but it’s never more than a handful. And again, we’d probably more more relationships with our investors than we have.

Sharon Sepik (34:20):

So for us, our debt manager does a really good job managing rating agency inquiries. She can answer most of them herself. Then we’ll sometimes have to reach out to water or sports authority or something like that. If she doesn’t have an answer or if it’s something that they have to answer specifically, I get involved helping her or when I need to ask, she needs something escalated for non-response. As far as investor inquiries, we don’t really get a lot of those. We have had a few investors go through an issuer and say, we can’t buy your commercial paper because of X, Y, z and the document. We had that twice. So we actually changed the document so that it met their internal requirements. That’s usually about it.

Matthew Hastedt (35:14):

I think for Charlotte, I think we’re a frequent issue. I think probably a lot of us up here, so we’re in pretty frequent conversation with all the rating agencies across our various credits. So I think it’s more ongoing. I think one thing that’s at least to me changed a little bit over the last couple years is I feel like for at least some of the rating agencies, there’s been a very, very heavy focus on calculations. So I think that is a little bit harder to sometimes pull information. In particular for our water sewer, we ultimately ended up withdrawing our fit rating in part because of some of the ongoing challenges of some of that ongoing surveillance for rating, or excuse me, for investors similar, we don’t get a ton of off-cycle questions when we’re in the market. We funnel those through our book runner on deals and sort of let them point to where it was in the POS and then if it’s really needed then maybe do a one-on-one.

(36:04):

But we’ve done sort of an every other year roadshow up to New York or Boston, et cetera, to sort of meet with investors. This past year we did a couple with investors for some of our larger holders as well as a lunch in Boston. At that same time, we had an opportunity to meet with all three rating agencies in New York as well to do an off cycle. This is just a general city update that I think worked out really well. Cause we had the city manager and some other senior level staff being able to really talk about just the city as a whole as opposed to really trying to sell and as well for the investors sort of more of a city perspective as opposed to why we’re trying to sell this one specific deal. So I think that’s been helpful for us as well.

David G. Moffett (36:47):

And I would add more than likely the higher rated credits, like you guys are not getting a lot of inquiries from investors because you’re higher rated credits, whereas some lower rated credits that may need some more attention during the year at least that’s been my experience. There are a lot of questions that come in through there. Other examples of how you’re keeping your story out in the marketplace, and I know Atlanta did their investor conference that they’ve done for a number of years and interested in Mohamed, your thoughts on what are y’all getting out of that? How are you coming to the different topics that you’re covering at the investor conference?

Mohamed Balla (37:42):

So we’ve done our, this is the second one we’ve done post COVID. So we try to do ’em every two years on biannual cadence. And essentially what we want to do is be able to tell the bigger picture of Atlanta the strategic direction where Atlanta is headed. So we need support across the spectrum, not just in issuance of debt but also in public private partnerships. Opportunities for some of our partners that can connect us with other entities that want to partner in something even from affordable housing perspective or as from an infrastructure perspective or coordinating with, I see Carey here with the Atlanta Fulton County Rec Authority. There’s a lot of things that the city is tasked with doing and not all of it could be done traditionally with the framework we have from tax exempt or revenue bonds. A lot of it’s going to be done in other avenues. And so we started to see some of the connections that were made in the investor conference are starting to be handed off to the mayor’s office to people that are in charge of anything from youth engagement to recreation.

David G. Moffett (39:04):

Any other examples of how you’re keeping your story? I mean, I know y’all sort of touched on that a little bit in the last question, but

Mohamed Balla (39:12):

The investor conference is one way that we do it. We also use our platforms with the mayor’s office and the mayor’s office of communications to make sure that we’re in front of the appropriate publications. We get the mayor in front of Bloomberg, for example. He has an interview just talking about where the city’s headed financially. We coordinate with our internal partners at the airport in a watershed shout outs to JP Morgan who has an infrastructure conference that we participate in every year. So it’s kinds of things that we’re always making sure that we participate in and avenues like this too. Go Atlanta, spend some after you guys leave here. Just go and enjoy these restaurants and get sales tax revenue into the system.

Matthew Hastedt (40:04):

Charlotte has attended the JP Morgan Aviation or transportation utility conference as well. And for both that, and I should have said this when we did our one-on-one investor tours right before those conferences start, we have someone in our Charlotte office posting it directly to Emma as well. So we’re also trying to make sure that we’re putting it out there for everyone as well. Just because you’re not in the room, obviously we have to disclose to the whole market so that presentation is up before we walk into our first one-on-one, so that way it’s fully out there for everyone, even if we can’t meet with someone individually. And are you putting that out on Emma or on your We have a bond link investor website. We’ll add it there too, but Emma, that’s the one that we make sure is up first.

Charlie Yadon (40:44):

Got it. And I’d say we do a lot of, one of our main ways outside of conferences and things like that and posting all of our rating presentations and things like that on our website is a lot of voluntary disclosures. I mean, not too many. We want to make it material and relevant, but especially in recent years with hurricanes or what’s going on with the Florida property insurance market, we’ve done standalone voluntary disclosures, almost many slide decks to sort of update the market. If you’re just reading the headlines, they can be very kind of overly pessimistic in a lot of ways or just missing details that are important for an investor who’s got money invested in the state of Florida to really understand what’s going on on the ground level and our view of how things are developing. So that’s one of the main focuses I will say on the Emma versus our own investor website.

(41:31):

It’s sort of a mixed bag for us. We issue for so many, I think it’s up to 35, 40 different credits across the state from universities and different state agencies that what becomes a struggle for us on Emma is which programs should this actually be posted on without creating noise. I remember back in my investment banking days, you get on certain Emma pages for an issuer and it’s got 55 filings. I can’t find anything. It’s too much information on there. So sometimes if we’re struggling with that, it’ll just go on our investor website. We’ll also we have an e notice list that we keep updated or as best we can and then shoot it out to that list. We do that with certain things like the governor’s budget recs come out, that’s not going on Emma, but we’ll put that on our website and we’ll distribute that to our e notice list.

Sharon Sepik (42:22):

We keep our investor website updated on a regular basis. That’s the biggest effort we use.

David G. Moffett (42:27):

And that’s a Nashville website if I’m not mistaken, right?

Sharon Sepik (42:32):

That’s

Susan Franklin Wilhelm (42:32):

Correct. nashville.gov.

David G. Moffett (42:34):

Yep, there you go.

Susan Franklin Wilhelm (42:35):

We keep a pretty low profile, I think mostly where obviously we’re very responsive to inquiries from investors, but generally speaking, as far as posting, some information is posted around the finance department’s website related to budgets and so on and so forth. But that’s really the extent of what we’re doing right now.

David G. Moffett (42:53):

Got it. So we’ll wrap up with one more question I wanted to ask each of you just to maybe, I know Charlotte’s airport is in the market now, and I know most of you guys have already done at least one large transaction this year, and a number of you guys, Nashville for example, has a big water and sewer transaction just like the group to hear some of the things that you’ve got right in the horizon and then we will open it up for questions and wrap it up. But maybe Matt, you start. Sure.

Matthew Hastedt (43:28):

So one deal that we’ve actually completed this year is the city bought 22 miles a rail track from Norfolk Southern. So we had a direct placement to reimburse ourselves for that. We have an airport transaction in the market right now, and this is all part of the presentation or the presentation I had on, so everyone can find it there as well. But we have a current water sewer refunding in July that we anticipate we anticipate a competitive housing issuance in September. We have a refunding of our draw program for streets and neighborhoods in October. Let’s see. We also have, we anticipate a commercial pap program starting up for Bank of America stadium improvements as the city council has approved 650 million of improvements. They are, so the first two years of authorization we anticipate seeking this fall as well busy.

Sharon Sepik (44:20):

We have the water and sewer deal that David already outed me on. Along with that we’re going to be doing a tender or trying to do a tender and we have a private placement deal that we are going to close around the same time for the amphitheater, turning it from non-taxable to taxable because of the private use. And we have the transit stuff that’s coming fast and furious after all of the protests over the surcharge related to that and the actual infrastructure. So hopefully we’ll be ramping that up in the next couple months. And we are going to be looking at the extendable water commercial paper program to see if we want to keep going with that path or I kind of angling for a note purchase agreement.

David G. Moffett (45:23):

We’ll see. Also busy.

Sharon Sepik (45:25):

Yes,

Mohamed Balla (45:27):

We stay busy. We are going to be busy across the three credits airport. We’ll be doing an issuance again for their continued expansion of concourse D as well as some short-term financing needs at the airport in a rental car facility for watershed. We’re in a refunding that will you bring in the market. We’re working with the department internally about the appropriate time for that transaction. And then we have a refunding for Mercedes-Benz did debt assurance as well too that landfall and county rec authority will be working on this fall.

Charlie Yadon (46:10):

So this spring I always tell people we kind of have a busy period now. Most of our call dates are June and July. All of our refundings happened in the spring kind of one after another I think. I mean we’re down our debt levels down to the point. We only had four or five callable candidates this year, so we knocked those out on the horizon. We have a turnpike new money deal for the state. The POS is out there. It could sell anytime now with 18 hours notice. And then looking forward on new money issuance. I think a focus of the state has really been transportation funding and you’re likely to see more bonding across our transportation programs over the next few years. And then outside of actual bond issuance, we did do, we got $500 million from the legislature last year for debt reduction. We did a 345 million cash funded tender in October. About a week ago we closed on 145 million cash defiance and we’ve utilized most of those funds and we’ll see if that program continues next year with an additional appropriation

Susan Franklin Wilhelm (47:15):

In Alabama. We are currently working on two large transportation infrastructure projects. One is the West Alabama corridor. It’s four lanes from mobile up the western side of the state just south of Tuscaloosa to tie into 59 20. The other transportation project is the Mobile River Bridge in Bayway, which is the new I 10 coming from mobile crossing the Mobile River and then a new Bayway across Mobile Bay. The Mobile River Bridge project is a progressive design build. So we’ll expect GMP sometime in late summer, early fall. We’re currently, we issued Garvey’s, I’ll say last month, I think it’s now month before last it turned over and we’re in the process now with TIA and Toll revenue bonds working towards those late summer. We’ve got some smaller projects related to some state capital complex improvements that need to be made. There is a new state house in Alabama home for the legislature being built, but that is not being funded by debt. That’s being built by our retirement systems. And then we’ve got some possible economic development issuances later in the summer. We’re still looking through those. And then last but not least, very interesting, our legislatures in session and Senate Bill 3 0 4 is sitting on the governor’s desk right now for signing. It may already be signed today and it creates the Alabama Energy Infrastructure bank. So we’re going to be starting to work on that this summer. Once the bill gets signed,

Matthew Hastedt (48:42):

Great. They forget. One other deal that we have is the Spectrum Center where the Hornets play. We currently have a draw program on that that we’re going to be taking out in July and anticipate another round of anticipation notes to continue that project that our city council also approved.

David G. Moffett (48:56):

Good, I appreciate that. So why, we still have a few minutes here. Why don’t we open it up to questions, and I know we’re standing between you and lunch, but let’s entertain a few questions

Mohamed Balla (49:11):

Or not.

David G. Moffett (49:12):

Yes, I guess, yeah, the mic right there.

Audience Member #1 (49:17):

Is this on?

David G. Moffett (49:18):

It is,

Audience Member #1 (49:19):

You guys talked about technology and you talked about banker coverage. I’m just curious if you’ve adopted Zoom meetings for your banker meetings or do you prefer in person or is a mix better?

Matthew Hastedt (49:33):

For me, it’s a mix. In Charlotte, obvious, we have a lot of bankers who are in the city, so it’s pretty easy for me to meet with a lot of them in person. Some of them will travel down. I tell people that I’m content either way. I think it’s about coverage. I don’t want someone to feel like they have to fly to Charlotte to do an hour meeting then fly home. I know that’s a big both time and monetary expense, so I’m happy to do Zoom, but it’s kind of whichever one they prefer

Sharon Sepik (50:00):

Either is fine with us also. Yeah, we do both. If people are in town, we’re really intentional about seeing them in the office.

Charlie Yadon (50:09):

Same for us. I mean, Tallahassee is not the easiest place in the world to fly into. So if you’re only coming to meet with us, don’t do it. If you’ve got other clients to meet with, that’s fine or that makes more sense for you. But we’re always fine with a Zoom call, although we have enjoyed, I think it was too many Zoom calls for a while and getting the mix back where you’re getting some in has been a big improvement.

Mohamed Balla (50:30):

Yeah, I think it’s a mix, but I don’t want to discourage anybody from coming to Atlanta come a lot, your whole team. But Phyllis said, don’t travel just for us, but if you’re in town, let us know if we could touch base.

David G. Moffett (50:48):