Michael Baker Corp. has tapped Citizens Bank to lead its new revolver with Fifth Third Bank and PNC Bank as participants. The revolver was increased from $40 million to $60 million, providing the engineering and energy management firm with some juice for potential acquisitions.
"The company is growing very rapidly and we'd also like to have some additional credit capacity for acquisition activity, so that was the driving reason behind expanding the credit facility," explained Bill Mooney, executive v.p. and cfo. "We have really excellent growth prospects... so it is to keep us adequately financed for working capital needs as well as with our higher profile to allow us to do some selected acquisitions."
PNC was new to the bank group and replaced National City Bank, according to Mooney. "We thought that we could not meet all of the desirable aspects of the cross selling requirements of each of the banks so we selected the banks that we thought we fit best with," he explained. Nat City officials did not return calls.
"We have a long standing relationship with the people at Citizens," Mooney said. "Citizens was formerly the middle-market bank operation at Mellon [Financial Corp]. The company's entire banking history had been with that Mellon middle-market group." Mark Latterner is the company's relationship manager at Citizens and Bill McKenzie is the chief executive responsible for Western Pennsylvania.
Mooney did not disclose the spread but said overall pricing is better. "Pricing has improved both in terms of the grid and in terms of letters of credit which is the other use for the facility," he noted. "About 25 basis points improvement in the spread and about 12.5 bps improvement in terms of letters of credit."