Scott Pierce: Financing urban growth;

              1
Scott Pierce
Financing urban
growth
It is 8:15 A.M., and for Scott Pierce, a top municipal finance professional, the day begins as it will end. On the run, Scott Pierce is senior vice president and manager of municipal finance marketing and syndication for E. F. Hutton & Company, the nation's third largest securities and investment banking firm.
In 1977alone, E. F. Hutton managed or co-managed more than $3.8 billion of municipal bond underwritings, and participated in more than half of the $44 billion of new municipal bond issues which came to market. Pierce is one of the people dedicated to making tax exempt financing cost-efficient for the issuer, attractive to the investor, and profitable for the underwriter. So by 8:15 on this steamy summer morning, Scott
Pierce is already behind the large desk in his glass-walled office. His jacket is off, the sleeves of a striped, button-down shirt rolled well past the elbows. The first of many styrofoam containers of Coca-Cola sits at his elbow. Sixteen floors below, the river traffic of America's largest seaport steams noiselessly by. The Statue of Liberty rises majestically above barges, ferries, freighters, and tugs in the manner of a nautical traffic cop.
Inside, the public finance trading floor is stirring/Within an hour, the floor will hum with a vibrancy which accompanies the making of million-dollar decisions. But at this early hour, it would take an act of exceptional clairvoyance to foresee in this stilled and quiet room the forces which will cause macadam highways to arc off over the horizon, or transform backwater hospitals into modern surgical palaces, cleanse industrial waterways, revitalize decaying cities with modern malls and plazas.
A team of associates is already seated around the conference table which dominates one corner of Pierce's office. The table is littered with the tools of the working municipal finance underwriter: pocket calculators, files, computer printouts, ruled yellow legal pads. Felt tip pens of every color are arrayed like chips in a high stakes poker game. Which indeed it is.
The first scheduled order of business in Scott Pierce's day is the researching and drafting of a proposal under which E. F. Hutton might be appointed syndicate manager for the financing of revenue bonds for Salt River, a public
53