CHICAGO — Detroit-based Miller, Canfield, Paddock and Stone PLC, Michigan’s top bond counsel firm, has tapped long-time public finance attorney Amanda Van Dusen to lead the public finance group.
Van Dusen has worked at Miller Canfield’s Detroit office for 30 years, watching as the city and the public finance market changed “tremendously” over the years.
In her new role, Van Dusen will oversee a group of 27 public finance attorneys throughout Michigan and in Illinois. In addition to Detroit, Miller Canfield maintains offices in Lansing, Kalamazoo, Ann Arbor, and Chicago.
Van Dusen takes the helm as local and state governments struggle to trim costs to offset falling revenue. That has meant a new focus for the firm’s public finance group, she said.
“We’re looking at ways to reduce the pressure on our clients’ budgets and stimulate employment by capitalizing on the recovery act and the new jobs bill,” she said. “We’re doing a lot of counseling on matters that relate to pensions or other large obligations, as they look for ways to address their pensions or other post-employment benefits liabilities.”
So great is the pressure on some local governments that the specter of municipal bankruptcy — unprecedented in the state — has been floated by some city officials, including Detroit’s team.
“We’ve never had a Chapter 9 case in Michigan, and so we are looking hard at what could happen,” she said. “It’s very speculative. A lot of market participants are asking us about it, and we’re learning a lot about it, and how to insulate transactions and investors from bankruptcy risk.”
Van Dusen has built a practice with a wide range of specialties. For 25 years she has been bond counsel for the Wayne County Airport Authority, which operates the Detroit Metropolitan Wayne County Airport, and has handled the city’s solid-waste financings for 30 years. She works on a number of nonprofit educational issuers, from K-12 to community colleges and private universities.
Thirty years of working in and for a hard-luck city like Detroit has given Van Dusen a unique perspective.
“When I started in 1980, Detroit was still in decline,” she said, recalling that back then the city would see only a handful of housing starts a year. “It was very, very difficult. Now — until the most recent economic crisis — we had housing starts in the thousands, and even though the economy is so rotten, we have small business development going on in the city in a very special way. We’ve been living through the recession for longer than anybody and people are finding opportunities.”
Van Dusen served as co-leader of public finance for the past two years with William J. Danhof, a principal in the Lansing office. Danhof remains with the firm.
Miller Canfield has 370 attorneys in offices in Michigan, Illinois, Florida, New York, Ohio, and internationally. The firm is Michigan’s top-ranked bond counsel, last year working on a total of $2.9 billion of volume on 103 transactions, according to Thomson Reuters. It ranked ninth in the Midwest last year, down from fourth in 2008.
