Jeffrey Diehl | Rhode Island Infrastructure Bank CEO and executive director
Whether your organization operates in the private or public sectors, focus on customers is paramount.
When Rhode Island Infrastructure Bank was created 30 years ago, we financed two different things – clean drinking water and projects to keep water clean, such as sewer lines and waste treatment plants. In those days, there seemed little, if any, overlap between the programs, so each was run by a different team in a slightly different way.
In recent years, our mandate was expanded to include municipal roads, bridges and energy.
We soon realized that these different financing programs had the same customers: municipalities and their enterprises. With this in mind, we transformed ourselves to provide our customers with integrated, financing solutions rather than individual loan programs.
Today, we work to change the thought process around financing large infrastructure projects by breaking them into their component parts and financing those parts in the least-expensive way.
Gov. Gina M. Raimondo’s program to increase investment in school infrastructure is a good example. School projects have energy, stormwater and water conservation components, among others. School districts can carve out certain aspects of their projects and significantly reduce interest costs by financing these components with us.
In short, we transformed ourselves to a customer-centric model to increase our municipal customers’ awareness of how our programs can help achieve infrastructure investment goals while reducing cost. This transformation is working as we achieved in this past fiscal year a record $160 million of lending to municipalities, more than the last two years combined.