Steven A. Goldfield, ESQ., Municipal Advisor Solutions, LLC, PEL Associate

Steven (financial advisor) has practiced law in the fields of government contracts and municipal finance for over 30 years in the commonwealth of Pennsylvania. For approximately 15 years, Steven practiced law in the public finance departments of Saul Ewing and Cozen O’Connor, where he served clients as bond counsel, underwriters’ counsel, disclosure counsel and issuer’s counsel.

Since 2005, Steven has also been a financial advisor to states and local governments with Public Resources Advisory Group as a senior managing director (and now senior counselor) and his own firm Municipal Advisor Solutions, LLC, or (“MAS”).

Steven has extensive experience working on strategies for states and local governments to reduce the budget impact of their unfunded accrued actuarial liabilities including pensions, other post-employment benefits and workers’ compensation.

For over five years, Steven worked with the Office of the Governor of West Virginia to significantly reduce that state’s unfunded accrued actuarial liabilities in the areas of pensions, other post- employment benefits and workers compensation. The workers compensations liabilities have been reduced from over $3.5 billion (on a present value basis) to well under one billion dollars. The pensions were super-funded using a Tobacco Securitization debt issuance, and OPEBS were significantly reduced through comprehensive restructuring of benefits and risks to the state.

In the cities of Scranton and Johnstown, Steven played a lead role in looking at how to optimize the pay down of their long-term liabilities. In Scranton, this included an analysis of the benefits and risks of paying down high yield debt versus more or less pension deposits. In Johnstown it included how to balance the other needs of the city with the pension challenges and budget challenges that the city faced. Steven is frequently called upon in connection with assessing, structuring and implementing innovative public-to-public and public-to- private partnerships. These transactions typically involve creating a structure that optimizes the infusion of capital for the greater good of the municipal government or agency.

Steven was the financial advisor to the receiver for the city of Harrisburg, where he was instrumental in development and execution of the city’s recovery plan. The recovery plan involved sale of the city’s incinerator to a nearby municipal authority, monetization of parking assets, and restructuring of water and sewer operations. While some in the city advocated a sale of the water and sewer authority, the financial team instead created an operating authority, separated it sufficiently from the city to enable it to attain a credit rating and helped it to thrive on its own. Steven helped identify policy decisions that would have a material impact on the value of each of the municipal assets, and supported decision-makers in weighing pros and cons of issues such as sale to a private party vs. to a municipality authority, rate structure and limitations on increases, development of strategy to accommodate existing employees and labor agreements, and more.

Upon successful development and implementation of the recovery plan for the city of Harrisburg, Steven has been asked to assist in cities of Scranton, York, Chester, and Johnstown, and the boroughs of Shenandoah, Lemoyne and West Chester with assessing whether monetization of assets made sense and whether there was a public solution or a better way to achieve the goals of the municipality.

Steven was the financial advisor for Chester on its 2017 bond issue and worked on a concept of securitizing Act 205 payments for a pension obligation bond structure for Chester with PNC Bank. He was also retained by the city of Chester both as an advisor and as a lawyer on its efforts to sell the Chester Water Authority.

Steven received his law degree from Villanova University School of Law and a Bachelor of Arts Degree in Political Science, with distinction from George Washington University. His office is in Media, PA.