Public finance attorney Kenneth Lind was made partner at Nixon Peabody LLP, the firm announced Tuesday. Lind has served as bond counsel at the firm’s New York City office since leaving the state Metropolitan Transportation Authority in January 2008, where he had been acting finance director.
Lind, 58, worked on the two most recent deals to receive The Bond Buyer’s Deal of the Year award — 2009’s $963 million Dulles Toll Road revenue bond issue that financed part of an extension of the Washington Metropolitan Area Transit Authority rail system to Dulles Airport; and the Puerto Rico Housing Finance Authority’s $384 million 2008 deal that helped finance a public housing modernization project.
He worked for 11 years at the MTA, operator of the nation’s largest mass transit system, spending most of his tenure as deputy general counsel for public finance before stepping in as acting finance director for 15 months.
“All of those different facets of the MTA [give] you a great background in toll road financings, in commuter rail, and other fare-based systems,” Lind said. The challenge on transportation projects in today’s difficult economy is “structuring revenue streams and initial cash inflows to make sure you can get through the construction process and still have a successful financing going forward,” he said.
Before joining the MTA, he was a public finance attorney at Brown & Wood for about 16 years, before it merged with Sidley Austin LLP.
Arthur McMahon Jr., practice group leader at Nixon, said he had worked with Lind for a long time as bond counsel on MTA deals and was eager to hire him.
“He’s worked for issuers, underwriters, providers of derivative products,” McMahon said. “He’s got wide name recognition in the industry on both coasts.”
Nixon Peabody was bond counsel on $8.3 billion of deals in the Northeast in the first half of 2010, making it the top ranked firm in the region, according to Thomson Reuters.
