After more than a year of deliberating over various public-private investment schemes, the newly-minted Chicago Infrastructure Trust has unanimously passed a roughly $30-million project to retrofit 75 city buildings using a novel financial instrument that pays for the work through the job's long-term energy savings.
"It's pretty clever," said Claire Tramm, the trust's energy program director, just minutes after the vote. "We are just repurposing money that we would otherwise spend on utility bills."