Lucy Hooper of Davenport will take over as MSRB chair on Oct 1

PHOENIX – Lucy Hooper of Davenport & Company will serve as the next chair of the Municipal Securities Rulemaking Board and Arthur Miller of Goldman, Sachs & Co. will serve a second term as vice chair, the board announced Wednesday.

Hooper, an executive vice president at Davenport, will take her new seat on Oct. 1 as the MSRB begins its new fiscal year. She will replace Colleen Woodell, former chief credit officer of global and corporate and governmental ratings at Standard & Poor's.

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Hooper has been an MSRB Board member since 2014, and is a member of the nominating and governance committee. She joined Davenport in 1981 and has served as director of fixed income sales and trading since 2000. Prior to that she worked as a trader and in fixed income sales for First and Merchant National Bank, which became Sovran Bank. From 2000 to 2008, Hooper was a subject matter expert on the MSRB’s Professional Qualifications Advisory Committee.

Miller, who is co-head of Goldman's public finance strategies and analytics group, has also been a board member since 2014. Prior to joining the firm in 1985, Miller worked as an associate attorney at Mudge Rose Guthrie Alexander & Ferdon.

“The Board revised the MSRB’s strategic goals this year to address the evolving dynamics of the municipal securities market,” said MSRB executive director Lynnette Kelly. “Our newly elected leadership represents a strategic combination of market expertise and continuity, and will provide a steady hand as we pursue these new goals.”

New members joining the board for four-year terms are: William Fitzgerald, Sr., founder of Fitzgerald Asset Management; Manju Ganeriwala, Treasurer of the Commonwealth of Virginia and former president of the National Association of State Treasurers, Seema Mohanty, founder and managing director of Mohanty Gargiulo;, Donna Simonetti, former JP Morgan executive director; and Beth Wolchock, managing director of Oppenheimer & Co.

The board is made up of 11 public representative members and 10 members from firms regulated by the MSRB, including broker-dealers, banks and municipal advisors. The Dodd-Frank Act mandated that the board be majority public. Wolchock will represent securities firms, while Mohanty will represent municipal advisors. Fitzgerald, Ganeriwala, and Simonetti will be classified as public members. Simonetti has been retired for two years, but worked for securities firms for some 35 years prior to that.

“I am delighted that we have attracted such a diverse and experienced class of new Board members, who will undoubtedly help advance the MSRB’s compliance, transparency and education objectives,” Kelly said.

The MSRB also announced that board member Gary Hall, whose term was set to expire Sept. 30, will serve an additional two years on the to complete the term of Pat Sweeney, who recently resigned from the board due to a job change.

The other board members will be J. Anthony Beard, Renee Boicourt, Robert Clarke Brown, Julia Harper Cooper, Ron Dieckman, Richard Ellis, Jerry W. Ford, Richard Froehlich, Lakshmi Kommi, Kemp J. Lewis, Chris Ryon, Edward J. Sisk and Dale Turnipseed.

Leaving the board are Ehlers president Steve Apfelbacher, New York University professor Dall Forsythe, former Yucaipa Companies head Rita Sallis, and Woodell.

The MSRB selected the new members from more than 90 applicants, which included Montgomery County, Maryland administrator and former Government Finance Officers Association president Timothy Firestine, retired former head of the U.S. Treasury Office of State and Local Finance Kent Hiteshew, California Deputy Treasurer Tim Schaefer, and Kidwell & Company chief Larry Kidwell, who was previously president of the National Association of Municipal Advisors.

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