Westhoff, Cone & Holmstedt

City of Stockton

Success Stories
City of Stockton

Stockton is a relatively large, fast-growing north central city that serves as a County seat and is experiencing steady growth. The City is experienced at debt issuance and maintains plans for land-secured financing of development-driven public improvements in the near future. While Stockton is somewhat larger than the average California municipality, in some ways it represents the size that many communities will achieve within a decade or less based on projected population increases.

As Stockton's Underwriter, Westhoff, Cone & Holmstedt has achieved the following innovations and results:

We developed a financing plan involving multiple, staged series of Bonds issued for the Airport Business Park demonstrating successful, carefully planned growth that fulfilled development expectations and built trust in the City's name among the investment community.
The second Airport Business Park financing included a Reserve Fund in the form of a Letter of Credit (LOC) not funded from bond proceeds, an innovation that lowered annual debt service and maximized the developer's debt leverage. A Bond LOC throughout a development buildout period, an innovation that enhanced an otherwise non-rated issue by mitigating construction risk, thus lowering the effective borrowing cost of the transaction.
A refunding of two separate Assessment Districts utilizing a pooled issuance via a Public Financing Authority (PFA). The PFA structure developed by Westhoff, Cone & Holmstedt had not been used previously in Stockton for this purpose, and it achieved significant savings for each Assessment District by taking advantage of efficiencies in the cost of issuance.
Most recently, the firm sole managed $18,185,000 1915 Act Bonds for Stockton's Mosher Assessment District in September 2003. While it represents a fairly straightforward financing of this type, Westhoff, Cone & Holmstedt managed to balance the needs of multiple developers across three separate Project Areas and to overcome difficult market conditions by aggressively marketing and re-pricing the bonds and committing to the underwriting despite a large percentage of serial bonds remaining unsold at the time of the award.

We believe that the results we have achieved as Underwriter for the City of Stockton and the other municipal clients referenced herein, especially in terms of Assessment District financings, will directly benefit our municipal clients as they plan and implement their capital programs. Westhoff, Cone & Holmstedt has the expertise to assist cities and counties in structuring land-secured and other debt in the most creative, innovative, and fiscally sound manner possible, and then to market such debt so as to achieve the lowest borrowing cost possible.

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