Infrastructure 2023 Day Two Opening Remarks

Introductory remarks provided by the conference chairs.

Transcription:

Matthew Neuringer (00:08):

Good morning. Good morning. How's everybody doing? My name is Matt Neuringer. I'm a Partner. That's me. I'm a partner at Orrick Herrington and Sutcliffe. And on behalf of Orrick and the Bond Buyer, welcome to day two of the infrastructure conference here in Chicago. We're here at the Historic Palmer House. Now, instead of giving you a really exciting illuminating detail about Orrick, really exciting and illuminating public finance and infrastructure practice, I'm just going to give you a bunch of random facts about the Palmer House that you could use tonight at the cocktail party and basically for the rest of your life. So look right here in this room, in this hotel, you are sitting in the oldest continually operating hotel in the United States of America. This hotel, which was built by Potter Palmer on November 8th, 1873, was actually built as a wedding gift. Yes. So if you're getting married, don't tell anybody this story because it will make you seem very inadequate as a wedding gift to his 23 year old bride, Bertha.

(01:24)

Of course, Bertha and Bertha, as you can tell, had a bit of a taste for extravagance and on a trip to France, as one does when they're on a trip to France, they become good friends with Claude Monet. And so she was heavily influenced by impressionist art, and so you can see that throughout the hotel. You can see it in Frescos, and you can see it in a art exhibit that currently exists with some of that art here in the hotel right now. So I know that this is a group with a lot of free time, so go and check it out in your free time while you're here at the conference, bring some people along and network. Now, relevantly on the infrastructure side, this hotel old Potter Palmer was the Elon Musk of his time when it comes to hoteliers, Potter Palmer was the first one to put light bulbs, the telephone and the steam powered lift, which you all took up and down to get to your hotel rooms here in this hotel.

(02:25)

First one in America at the time. Now, on this incredible stage, we've had Frank Sinatra. We've had Judy Garland, we've had Louis Armstrong, we've had Liberace, and now you've got me Infrastructure Partner at Orrick, a truly historic moment for this hotel. They're going to add it to the website, which is where I got all these facts, by the way. So whenever I mention to people I'm going to a conference, they say, well, you're a lawyer. You're supposed to be billing behind a desk 21 a day. What are you doing at a conference, not billing? And I say, look, this conference, this one in particular, the Bond Buyer, is a prime example for why getting out behind the desk is absolutely critical, even for a toiling, a lawyer like myself, because we've got to get together and learn from each other. We've got to brainstorm. We've got to synergize because that is more powerful and potentially more valuable.

(03:24)

Don't tell my CFO than the 42 hours I could have built in the last two days. The people in this room have and continue to be the leaders across America that are some of the driving force behind building and rebuilding, and hopefully financing with some tax exempt debt infrastructure that our generation and the generations beyond us will come to rely on. We have incredible public servants that are here from Kathleen Sharman, the CFO of the Greater Orlando Aviation Authority to Chris Meister, Executive Director of the Illinois Finance Authority to Ben Watkins, who everyone can agree, the transformational force of nature, who makes us all laugh and enjoy the conference a bit more than what you're enduring right now.

(04:06)

Today, the conference will be capped out with discussions from Jeremy Fine, the CFO and Treasurer of Chicago Transit Authority to Dr. Morteza Farian, who's appointed by the President of the United States as the Executive Director of the Build America Bureau, and incredibly the mayor of this great city of Chicago, which I'm super pumped for the opportunity we have to soak it all in together in this incredible historic place to meet with one another, to tell war stories, which if you were in the last panel yesterday, there was a few of those and Plan for the Future with our rising stars this evening is incredible. And so join me as part of this infrastructure revolution. Have some fun, and take advantage of as much as this as you can throughout the day.