Kevin Bain, formerly director of strategy for the city of Detroit, has joined Public Sector Consultants as a senior strategist for climate and project finance.
The nonpartisan public policy consulting firm’s reputation and history of innovation in the green bank space drew him to the role, Bain told The Bond Buyer. And his background in climate finance — he served as a consultant for the World Bank and worked on Detroit’s solar deal, among other relevant experience — made the new role a good fit.
“When they reached out to me, I was very excited to lean into this growing industry,” Bain said. “There’s so much to do! Our country is behind other countries, particularly other Western nations, on green financing. And we now have this big injection of capital into the industry … but we’re still starting from a pretty new market.”
Bain earned a master’s degree in public policy from the Harvard Kennedy School and a Bachelor of Business Administration and Bachelor of Arts from the University of Michigan.
Shortly after launching his career at the World Bank, he also served as a mayoral fellow for the city of Detroit. He went on to become associate debt manager, debt manager and then director of strategy for Detroit’s Treasury and Office of the CFO.
As PSC’s lead on financing strategies for state and municipal green banks across the country, Bain says the search for practical energy solutions shouldn’t break down along party lines and he’s excited to figure out how such work can move ahead in a nonpartisan way.
“Our country has very quickly growing demand for energy, and so we need a lot more energy production, and we also need energy efficiency,” he said, noting clean energy in particular has some advantages. “A lot of us need to get involved in making sure that there’s capital available for growing our energy industry. … There’s more and more technology that’s consuming energy. We need to rise to meet that demand.”
Bain’s work with Detroit — which over the past decade emerged from the world’s largest municipal bankruptcy to rise to investment-grade status — taught him a lot about how to solve big problems.
“Detroit was the most interesting place to work in terms of public finance,” he said. “Working there was such an opportunity to learn about the best and the worst, and make really hard decisions, and convince elected officials about the importance of being fiscally responsible.
“I had the opportunity to do some really innovative financings,” he added. “It was everything. … I just had an amazing experience; I loved working there. I loved serving the residents.”
As he looks to bring that experience to bear on the challenges facing Michigan and other states — Illinois and Indiana are also among his new firm’s clients — Bain remains an advocate for Detroit’s successful comeback.
“I’d love to take my experience in Detroit and apply it to other places in my own state and other states,” he said. “Public Sector Consultants takes the stance that they are nonpartisan, and they’re focused on solving problems from a very objective, data-driven perspective.”
To that end, Bain is already applying lessons learned about energy efficiency and investor behavior.
“What we have found is that people aren’t going to invest in energy efficiency and clean energy just for the [social] good of it,” he said. “We have solutions for that; we just have to go and sell those solutions.”