Year 15 Strategies for Nonprofits
Warren Sebra
Principal
Novogradac & Company LLP
Warren Sebra is a principal in the Portland, Ore., office of Novogradac & Company LLP. Mr. Sebra has experience in affordable housing and community development, including low-income housing tax credit (LIHTC), new markets tax credit (NMTC) and historic rehabilitation tax credit (HTC) transactions. He has worked extensively on financial statement audits, tax return preparation, final cost certification audits, transaction underwriting, placed-in service applications, LIHTC compliance, NMTC compliance and NMTC allocation applications. Mr. Sebra has also contributed to various publications, including the Novogradac Journal of Tax Credits, and contributed to Novogradac’s Low-Income Housing Tax Credit Handbook and Historic Rehabilitation Handbook. Mr. Sebra is a frequent speaker at industry conferences and seminars on affordable housing and community development industry topics. He received a bachelor’s degree in accounting and a master’s degree in accounting from Brigham Young University. Mr. Sebra is licensed in Oregon and California as a certified public accountant.
Philip Melton
Executive Vice President
Bellwether Enterprise Real Estate Capital LLC
Philip Melton was a senior managing director with Hunt Mortgage Group, formerly Centerline Capital Group, a wholly owned subsidiary of Hunt Companies. He led the Affordable Housing Department and was the head of the FHA lending platform as well as a member of the company executive committee at Centerline Mortgage Capital Inc. Before that, Mr. Melton was the head of affordable housing and FHA lending platform at Grandbridge Real Estate Capital LLC for more than eight years. During his 20-year career, Mr. Melton has implemented new processes and developed crucial relationships with Freddie Mac and FHA, and has generated and managed more than $3.6 billion in financings. He is an alumnus of University of New Orleans, where he completed his bachelor’s degree in economics. He is a member of the advisory board for the Tax Credit Advisor, a contributing author for The Scotsman Guide and has been a speaker at more than 60 different Affordable Housing Industry conferences during the past 15 years.
Bill Truax
Chief Development Officer
Community Development Inc.
Bill Truax is chief development officer at Community Development Inc. His responsibilities include deal structuring for low-income housing tax credit (LIHTC) and tax exempt bond developments; site acquisition and contract negotiations; managing relations with equity and debt partners; managing competitive applications for credits, bonds, HOME, CDBG, NSP, TCAP, TCEP funds and other grants and loans in various states, including HUD 221(d) and 223(f) programs. He has more than 10 years of affordable housing experience and eight years with CDI, where he’s overseen the development of more than 2,000 units. Mr. Truax is the board secretary and treasurer for a nonprofit homeless continuum provider and in January, he will be a board member of Rugby Idaho, which provides a creative outlook to youths in the Pacific Northwest. He received a bachelor’s degree in economics from Columbia University.
Thomas K. Vandiver
Partner
Dentons
Thomas Vandiver practices in various area of finance including public and municipal finance, banking, affordable housing, real estate law and corporate finance transactions. Mr. Vandiver is the head of Dentons' legacy U.S. public finance practice and has more than 34 years of experience structuring and implementing tax-exempt bond and other finance transactions. He has also structured project financings involving energy tax credits, including photovoltaic/solar energy projects in which municipalities and school districts were the energy off-takers. In the public finance area, Mr. Vandiver has served as bond counsel, underwriter's counsel, counsel to financial institutions as private placement investors and lenders, issuer's and borrower's counsel and counsel to credit enhancers and trustees in hundreds of financing transactions involving billions of dollars of tax-exempt and taxable bonds, notes and other obligations, as well as other conventional financings. Mr. Vandiver also regularly counsels clients in connection with complex derivative transactions. These matters have provided financings for several hundred affordable housing developments throughout the country, for state and local governments, health care systems, senior living and retirement facilities, colleges, universities and private secondary schools, cultural institutions, manufacturing facilities, sports facilities, hotels and many other facilities, including for tribal borrowers. Mr. Vandiver is one of the leading lawyers in California for affordable housing transactions. In this area, he represents many of the major banks and financial institutions that provide financing and tax credit equity financing for these projects, having led his team through more than a hundred such projects in just the past three years. In addition, Mr. Vandiver regularly represents tax credit investors in low-income housing tax credit (LIHTC) transactions and new markets tax credit (NMTC) transactions. He has worked extensively on restructuring troubled financings, including restructuring of tax-exempt bonds. This experience has included a successful major restructuring of the financing and derivative contracts for a medical school and a university covering allied health services and nursing in South Central Los Angeles. Mr. Vandiver also led a team that had responsibility for the $2 billion in bonds at airports around the U.S. for United Airlines when Dentons represented the creditor's committee in that bankruptcy.