Megan Kilgore, the city auditor of Columbus, Ohio, will be leaving the post to launch a technology consulting firm, BKC Group, with Gregg Bienstock.
The Columbus City Council will appoint a successor to serve until the next general election, Kilgore told The Bond Buyer.
After nearly a decade in office, Kilgore leaves Columbus with triple-A ratings from Fitch Ratings, Moody's Ratings and S&P Global Ratings. The city has also been recognized as a model
"I want to congratulate City Auditor Megan Kilgore on her new professional opportunity and thank her for her dedicated service to the people of Columbus," Mayor Andrew Ginther said in an emailed statement. "No one could foresee the ways the pandemic would challenge our city when she was elected in 2018, but together, we maintained our city's AAA credit rating, even as we navigated unprecedented challenges."
Ginther also credited Kilgore's leadership with years of balanced budgets and positioning the city to secure voter approval of a $1.9 billion bond package in 2025.
"Candidates seeking City Council's appointment to the role will have big shoes to fill," he said, adding that Kilgore's "diligence and commitment have helped our city and our people realize greater prosperity than ever before."
"The best transitions occur when offices are in exceptionally strong places, and that's what I had," Kilgore said. "I had an incredibly deep bench of professionals in every aspect of my office ... and I was frankly confident that we were at our peak."
She and her team "built a fully modern financial and operational backbone," giving them real-time visibility into the city's finances, Kilgore said. She also leaves behind a leadership team "that's not only highly capable, but recognized nationally," she said.
"That's probably what I'm most proud of," she added. "The most important asset of a city is its people."
BKC Group will be devoted to helping the municipal bond market modernize and will pursue that goal on two main fronts, Kilgore said.
By market modernization, "I mean preparing the market for next-generation digital infrastructure — including tools and technologies like blockchain and tokenization," she said.
"The way that we've issued bonds has largely been unchanged for quite some time," but the "underlying rails" of how infrastructure gets funded and how capital moves are undergoing major shifts, she said.
"I've always thought the municipal market moves like a whale shark — large and deliberate," said Kilgore, who enjoys scuba diving. "We're seeing modernization drive real improvements in other markets, but we haven't taken the same forward steps in how muni bonds are issued, settled and repaid."
Pointing to "real momentum in digital securities," Kilgore said BKC Group's goal will be to help institutions navigate the transition as the infrastructure of the muni market modernizes.
They will also help shape that transition by convening a small group of institutions around the shared goal of strengthening the market's infrastructure, particularly "the underlying rails that support issuance settlement, trading and the flow of data," Kilgore said.
"We want this to be a market-led effort that represents the ideas of what those leading the market today think is necessary for the next period of municipal finance," she said.
Their goal is not to disrupt existing "systems of trust," but to work within those frameworks. To that end, they plan a listening tour in May.
"If we can build a neutral consortium, I think we can create a structure where leading institutions and market participants help refine the scope — and ultimately make a great market work better," Kilgore said.
"A key point for me is that this work is intended to be market-aligned," she added by email. "It's not about disruption, but about improving how the market functions — i.e., making it more efficient, transparent, and better positioned for the future while staying consistent with existing regulatory frameworks and market structure."
Kilgore said she's eager to be a part of the effort to build next-generation infrastructure to support the muni market, but it's "a bittersweet decision" to move on.
"We're at a point where the demands on the municipal finance market are increasing, but the systems supporting it have not kept pace," she said. "And so for a market of this size and importance … I think the next decade will be defined by how we really close that gap."
