Jones is the former head of the Anchorage municipality's Department of Health and Human Services and was chair of Alaska Housing Finance Corp.'s board for eight years.

George K. Baum & Co., of Kansas City, Mo., is the only other investment banking firm with an office in Alaska.

Siebert Brandford Frank, also the nation's largest minority-owned investment banking firm, is headquartered in Oakland, Calif. With its new location in Anchorage the company has 14 offices nationwide, according to Napoleon Brandford III, the company's chairman.

Siebert is best known for being the first woman appointed to a seat on the New York Stock Exchange. She held the seat from 1967 to 1975.

Brandford was in Anchorage July 30 and 31 with Gary Gayton, senior vice president, who is in charge of the firm's northwest division, to meet with local government and business leaders and Jones.

Gayton was deputy administrator and acting administrator of the Urban Mass Transit Administration, now the Federal Transit Administration, during the administration of President Jimmy Carter. The transit administration is to inner-city infrastructure what the Federal Highway Administration is to surface transportation links between cities.

Brandford said the company wants to lend its expertise and experience in large public sector financing to Alaska municipalities, school districts and state agencies.

The company has not done any deals in Alaska yet, but it has worked on consulting projects with state agencies, he said.

In fact, it was recent work the firm did for the state Department of Revenue analyzing the financing of a large Alaska natural gas project that led Siebert Brandford and Shank to look at Alaska more closely and to open an office, Brandford said.

The value the firm can offer clients in Alaska is experience in creative financing techniques and packaging federal funds with available state and local money, he said. A recent project Siebert Brandford and Shank did was for the North Texas Tollway Authority, a toll highway project financed with a combination of state, federal and local dollars. The firm also just completed a $98.7 million revenue bond package for the Dallas Area Rapid Transit.

Alaskans are keenly interested in ways that local dollars can be stretched these days, given tight budget resources but a continuing growth in needs, Jones said.

The big projects Alaska hopes to build, ranging from a proposed Knik Arm crossing to Gov. Frank Murkowski's new rural roads initiative and the biggest project of all, a multi-billion-dollar North Slope gas project, will all demand new ways of packaging private and public funds, she said.

"We hope to bring new and innovative ways of doing financings. There are a lot of ways dollars can be leveraged with tax benefits and other strategies, such as leasing," Brandford said.

He was reluctant to discuss details of some of the strategies the firm has developed recently lest competitors gain from them.

"It's like an intellectual property right, but once the first deal is done everyone knows about it," he said.

Siebert Brandford and Shank will be able to call on resources of all of its national offices, he said.

Securities Data Corp. ranked the firm No. 2 in the nation, behind J.P. Morgan Securities, in the average size of an underwriting deal in 2002, Brandford said.

"We were ranked No. 1 until J.P. Morgan landed a $6 billion power development financing project in California," Brandford said.