Summary: The firm’s Corporate & Public Finance team served as bond counsel for a regional transportation authority with respect to the issuance of various series of municipal bonds to fund the $3.9 billion Hampton Roads Bridge Tunnel (HRBT) expansion project, the largest public works project in Virginia’s history.
The Challenge: The HRBT is an important regional transportation link for residential, commercial, industrial, and military mobility, with more than 90,000 vehicles using the existing HRBT daily. For over three decades, public and area leaders have identified persistent and significant traffic congestion and delays at the HRBT as an important issue for the Hampton Roads region, with vehicles routinely queuing for miles in each direction, impacting economic productivity and quality of life across the region. The HRBT expansion project is intended to address severe traffic congestion by increasing capacity and upgrading approximately ten miles of I-64, including the 3.5-mile-long water crossing to create an eight-lane bridge-tunnel facility with six consistent lanes. The HRBT expansion project required an experienced team of public finance professionals to secure the necessary financing.
Our Strategy: Over the course of many years and various transactions, our firm and the rest of the client’s financing team worked to implement a sound financing structure across distinct types of public financing transactions in order to fund the client’s share of the $3.9 billion HRBT project. These transactions included the issuance of various series of TIFIA (Transportation Infrastructure Finance and Innovation Act) bonds, bond anticipation notes and revenue bonds, which were secured by certain regional tax revenues generated by (i) an additional retail sales and use tax on transactions, and (ii) an additional wholesale motor vehicle fuels sales tax, and certain toll revenues.
The Result: Through careful planning and working effectively with the financing team, the Department of Transportation, and other entities, our experienced transactional attorneys navigated various questions of federal tax and securities laws, and state and local government law, in order to secure the billions of dollars of necessary funding for the project. These transactions demonstrate the firm’s deep expertise in structuring complex, large-scale public infrastructure financings in order to deliver successful outcomes for our clients.
