Transaction Details

Village of Bedford Park

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Baird served as sole underwriter on the Village’s $3,655,000 Hotel/Motel Tax Revenue Bonds, Series 2024 and $26,985,000 Taxable Hotel/Motel Tax Revenue Bonds, Series 2024B. The Village issued the Bonds to help finance Phase 2 of the Village owned Event Center which is estimated to cost $32 million. It includes a 40,000 sq. ft. exclusive practice facility for the WNBA’s Chicago Sky, a turf box with two baseball infields and batting cages, a retail store, space for the Illinois Basketball Hall of Fame buildout, and additional seating and space in the restaurant and concession areas.

To fund this addition to the Event Center, the Village will use $18.5 million in proceeds from the 2024B Bonds, a contribution from the Chicago Sky and approximately $7.6 million in Capital Projects (“CIP”) Fund reserves. The 2024A Bonds funded $3.5 million in tax-exempt eligible street improvements that would have otherwise been funded by the Village’s CIP Fund. Doing this allowed the Village to use $3.5 million from its CIP Fund reserves for the Event Center project at a substantially lower cost.

Baird assisted the Village in achieving a rating upgrade from “A3” to “A2” on its hotel/motel tax revenue bonds. This included drafting a rating presentation that emphasized growth and sufficiency in the hotel/motel tax revenue stream and a strengthening in the Village’s overall credit.

Despite the additional bonds test of 1.25x maximum annual debt service, we recommended a bond structure that generated debt service coverage no less than 1.5x to ensure the marketability of the Bonds and a positive rating outcome.

As a result of our pre-marketing efforts, Baird received over $173.5 million in orders (5.8x total par) with oversubscriptions in 21 of 22 maturities by as much as 12.1x. We received orders from and gave allotments to 26 unique investors, broadening the Village’s hotel/motel investor base. Because of these oversubscriptions, we were able to lower the yields in 20 of 22 maturities by 3 to 15 basis points (0.03%-0.15%).