City leaders face a catch-22 when it comes to funding infrastructure projects for climate resilience, energy management and other green initiatives, University of Maryland researcher Anton Steshenko told Smart Cities Dive. Institutional investors such as pension funds and insurance companies collectively manage trillions of dollars and are searching for long-term investments that provide cash flow, Steshenko said. Infrastructure resilience projects could meet that demand, but most municipal infrastructure projects are too small, fragmented and complex for institutional investors to get involved, he said. The institutional investors “don’t want to have to analyze each $5 million project,” he said. “They want to make a contribution to local government but don’t have the tools to do that.” As a result, smaller municipalities struggle to access capital, and instead use their public funds for infrastructure loans or grants rather than leveraging those funds to attract private investment, he said. “America’s infrastructure challenge is not primarily a capital problem. It is an institutional design problem,” he said. Steshenko’s latest research paper lays out a hybrid institutional capital model, or HICM, that could connect local, statewide or multistate municipalities seeking infrastructure funding, group their infrastructure projects into a financing package and work with institutional investors to fund those projects. “It’s a new way to unlock private capital for smaller community projects that are being ignored today,” he said. “Rather than asking how governments can find more money, I asked, how can we organize infrastructure projects so that large investors can participate in those projects?” Green bank intermediaries Stehenko said Maryland’s Montgomery County GreenBank is using a version of his HICM for a multi-municipality infrastructure financing project that may be completed by the end of next year. Steshenko said green banks — state, local or nonprofit financial institutions that use public or private funds to help