The quasi-governmental Development Finance Authority of Summit County and organizations that it staffs and manages have provided more than $882 million in financing for 341 projects in Ohio under Chris Burnham’s leadership for a quarter of a century.
From construction of the Amazon facility at the former Rolling Acres Mall site in Akron to the Hall of Fame Village project in Canton, the Development Finance Authority (DFA) has supported many of the region’s biggest projects.
And it’s all been led by Burnham, who announced Tuesday that he’s retiring at the end of 2024 as the first president of the Akron-based agency.
Reflecting on his career at DFA, Burnham said, “I just have found that Akron, to me — it seems like a place where it’s the right size to not be too complex, not be overly political.”
However, he said, “It’s not easy to attract investment capital into a mid-sized city in the Midwest.”
In 2025, Rachel Bridenstine will take over as DFA’s president to manage its coffers and 15-member team. She currently serves as DFA’s vice president and executive director of its managed entities Development Fund of the Western Reserve (DFWR), focused on tax credits, and Western Reserve Community Fund (WRCF), which provides lending to small businesses and nonprofits.
“She’s been here since ’15 and made a pretty immediate impression on me as someone who has leadership qualities that people responded well to — and smart,” Burnham said.
Bridenstine, who first joined DFA as a project coordinator, said she is “honored,” “excited” and “appreciative of everything that Chris and the DFA team has done.” She said the largest lessons she has learned from Burnham include “how to lead with the expertise that we have” and contribute value to the community.
“We all have an aligned mission,” Bridenstine said of DFA’s team. “I like, too, that we come from different types of backgrounds and bring different perspectives, which is really important in our work, too, that it’s a combination of factors with people with a drive to do great things in our community, and learn.”
Moving beyond port duties
Until 2012, the Development Finance Authority was the Summit County Port Authority. Summit County Council created the port authority in 1993 to preserve the county’s abandoned rail lines for transportation use. Burnham was then serving as the county’s director of development and helped create the port authority.
Burnham left the county in 1994 to work as director of marketing for ASW Services, a supply chain management company, and started the International Business Park at the Akron-Canton Airport.
Meanwhile, Summit County established the port authority as a separate entity with expanded financial authority and appointed its first board of directors.
The authority was created to help obtain needed capital for economic development projects, primarily in Northeast Ohio.
The county provided the port authority operational support and granted $3 million to the agency to establish a bond fund.
“We took that $3 million, and we put it into a trust account with a bank, and we applied underwriting criteria,” Burnham said, which allowed the agency to obtain a BBB- S&P rating, the lowest “investment grade” rating.
That measure of the authority’s credit worthiness rose to A-, and Bridenstine said it could increase further.
Funding expansion
Bridenstine put total assets for the Development Finance Authority, Development Fund of the Western Reserve and Western Reserve Community Fund around $300 million. DFA and its managed organizations, including the Energy Special Improvement District (ESID) for clean energy financing, require more than 20 audits.
DFA has flourished in part because clients of its bond fund must put down a 10% reserve, Burnham said. While the clients pay their principals down, the reserves continue to build for DFA.
Looking back, Burnham said, “we basically took $3 million and turned it in to over $200 million worth of lending capacity.”
Bridenstine spearheaded the creation of Western Reserve Community Fund, the small business and nonprofit lending arm, in 2019. It currently has lending capacity of about $5 million and doles out loans averaging $40,000, Bridenstine said.
DFA recognized by community, organizational leaders
Summit County Executive Ilene Shapiro said she started worked with Burnham in 2006.
“At that time, it was a different organization than it is today,” she said.
“He’s very thoughtful,” Shapiro said. “He’s very intentional about things and works through the details — because we all know the devil’s in the details most of the time — and has led the organization to grow and change as our economy and our needs in our community have changed from an economic development perspective.”
And Shapiro nominated Bridenstine for an award that the DFA vice president won, the 2021 Ohio Economic Development Professional of the Year from the Ohio Economic Development Association.
Shapiro said she commends Bridenstine for how “she has grown into the role, because it’s complicated. These are big deals, lots of players, and working through that, you just can’t airdrop somebody into those.”
The Akron nonprofit GAR Foundation has contributed grants to DFA for operating expenses and funded Akron Civic Theatre renovations, included in the 2018 to 2021 Bowery Redevelopment project.
GAR Foundation President Christine Amer Mayer said Burnham has been involved in “basically every big project in this community and a lot of big projects in the whole region.” That includes early 2000s and more recent renovations to the Civic.
Amer Mayer said DFA has “had a massive impact on our community in getting projects done and really importing dollars from the federal sources that we would not otherwise have.”
“I’m really thrilled to see Rachel stepping into this role because I think she’s one of the best emerging leaders that we’ve had in our community,” Amer Mayer said. “And I commend Chris not only for his leadership through the years, but also for having the foresight to mentor and prepare a fantastic internal candidate to step up.”
Toby Rittner, president and CEO of the national association Council of Development Finance Agencies (CDFA) called Burnham “one of the shining legends of our industry.”
Rittner said Burnham has turned DFA into the best development finance agency in Ohio and “one of the best in the country.” He added that Burnham closely followed strategic plans that Council of Development Finance Agencies wrote for DFA in 2010 and 2016 and has developed extensive programming for an agency of its size.
Rittner said Bridenstine is “innovative and creative.”
“She’s going to bring a new voice and a new personality to the authority, which I think is also going to be great for them,” Rittner said. “Chris is always a very quiet, mild-mannered person, and she’s going to bring out a little bit of the energy of the agency.”
