Public Finance

We guide state and local agencies, developers, and fund managers through candidate tract screening, economic impact modeling, Qualified Opportunity Fund (QOF) structuring, and compliance with enhanced rural incentives under the permanent OZ framework.

Commercial Property Assessed Clean Energy (C-PACE) provides low-cost, long-term financing covering up to 100% of costs for energy efficiency, water conservation, and structural resilience retrofits. We help property owners, lenders, and municipalities design programs, secure lender consent, and structure senior tax assessment financing.

Complex civic and community projects require synchronizing multiple, disparate capital sources. We specialize in braiding public concessionary funds, federal grants, tax-exempt municipal bonds, private preferred equity, and commercial senior debt into executable Special Purpose Vehicles (SPVs) that crowd in institutional investors.

Transitioning communities from reactive disaster recovery to proactive resilience planning requires innovative municipal governance. We help local governments establish Resilience Utility Districts, leverage tax increment financing (TIF), and deploy special assessments to retrofit vital infrastructure and attract private investment.

The CohnReznick Advantage combines deep public finance specialization with intelligent technology to help public sector entities, developers, and investors structure resilient capital stacks, navigate complex federal tax incentives, and act with greater speed, clarity, and confidence. Our advisors use analytical models trained on municipal finance to deliver deeper analysis and faster resolution of anomalies, while keeping human judgment at the center of transaction structuring, compliance oversight, and investor relations.

Opportunity Zones 2.0 is a permanent federal community investment framework established under the One Big Beautiful Bill (OBBB), replacing the temporary 2017 program. Key differences include recurring ten-year tract designation cycles across more than 42,000 eligible low-income census tracts, reinstated basis step-ups, enhanced incentives for rural tracts (including lower substantial-improvement thresholds), and expanded statutory data collection authority.

Commercial Property Assessed Clean Energy (C-PACE) provides long-term, fixed-rate financing covering up to 100% of hard and soft costs for energy efficiency, water conservation, and structural resilience retrofits. Repaid via a voluntary property tax assessment, C-PACE sits as a senior assessment that lowers overall capital costs and fills mezzanine financing gaps without requiring up-front equity outlay.

Public entities structure braided capital stacks by using public funds, federal grants, and municipal debt as concessionary or first-loss capital, which de-risks projects to crowd in private commercial lenders and institutional equity. CohnReznick helps design the legal, financial, and governance structures required to harmonize disparate reporting timelines, match requirements, and underwriting criteria into an executable Special Purpose Vehicle (SPV).

CohnReznick integrates public finance structuring with sustainability advisory to help public sector and commercial clients access green bonds, clean energy tax credits, and resilience utility financing. While our public finance practice focuses on capital syndication and municipal advisory, our dedicated sustainability specialists provide in-depth climate risk analysis, greenhouse gas accounting, and ESG disclosures.