Kate Crowley spent 15 years at big firms that kept asking her to pick a lane. Real estate sat in one practice group, manufacturing in another, the public sector in a third. Crowley wanted to advise across all of them.
So she left to do it. Today she runs CapCivic with Peter Haney, a former colleague, helping companies, developers, economic development groups and local governments finance projects and win the public approvals that come with them. She splits her time about evenly between public and private clients, and she does it on purpose.
That puts her in the room where more and more deals are being decided, the council meeting. My own reporting keeps landing in the same place. The project announcement is the easy part. The roads, water lines, power and public money behind it are the story, and the public is paying closer attention to all of it.
We talked about why those rooms are fuller, why she thinks that's good news, and what companies have to do differently now.
LOCATION DECISION: You spent 15 years in a national accounting and advisory firm. What did you see from inside a big firm that made you want to go out on your own?
KATE CROWLEY: What I saw, and I don't think I'm unique in seeing this, is that there's so much value in having an advisor who works both with growing companies, real estate investors, and public sector entities, whether that's municipal government, state government, or EDOs, in order to share those perspectives across clients. And so my primary reason for going out on my own was so that I could develop a client base with a balance of those perspectives, so that I could bring that value between private sector, public sector, and the various types of industries within those.
LD: The public side usually pays less. Why give it half your time?
CROWLEY: I very purposely try to reserve half of my time for working with EDOs and the public sector… and so it is a very intentional decision to focus so much of my time working with the public sector. When I'm involved in a corporate site selection decision, it's to help with the financing, and immediately part of that is public financing, whether it's incentives or infrastructure.
And so for me to bring to a corporate client true in-the-trenches understanding of how a state or local government is going to finance the infrastructure that the company needs, or how they're going to make decisions about an incentive, is super valuable.
I'm working about 50-50 between public sector and private sector now, and my value to clients is significantly greater than in the past when I was more siloed in one industry or the other.
LD: What have you learned on the municipal side that you didn't see before?
CROWLEY: One thing I'm doing now is truly getting in the weeds with municipalities on financing infrastructure. I've always had the perspective of what the corporate entity is going to need, but now I'm also gaining the perspective of how hard it can be, financially and politically, for a local government to provide that infrastructure on the timeline a company or developer needs.
I think the political landscape has shifted a lot. Across the communities I work in, there's a much higher level of community engagement today than there was five years ago. As a result, it's much more important to communicate why a local government might be borrowing millions of dollars for infrastructure, job creation, or affordable housing.
There are simply more people in the room at these meetings. More people are reading the minutes, reviewing the packets, and asking educated questions about why a project is being pursued and how it's going to impact their taxes.
LD: Data centers have become the national flashpoint. Is that what's filling those rooms?
CROWLEY: Data centers are definitely the hot topic, but we are seeing an increased need for community engagement across all project types. I work on a fair number of housing and industrial projects, and even in those projects there's more people in the room.
People are poring over the council packets and the council minutes and coming and saying, "Why are we looking at a general obligation bond on this project instead of a developer-financed bond?" And you're like, oh, okay, ready for that.
Which, from a business standpoint, is great for a consultant, because the questions are so specific that even a finance director or city administrator often can't answer all of them off the top of their head. People are reading the materials and showing up informed.
LD: What does that change when you're advising the company?
CROWLEY: It impacts the private sector work I do, and it impacts the public sector work that I do. Just got to be on your game at every meeting you walk into… I never walk into approval for an incentive now and think it's… procedural and administrative. It's never certain until the ink is dry, and for good reasons. People are more engaged and more involved, and elected officials are asking good questions too.
It's really changed how, when I'm advising a corporate client, having to come up with contingency financing plans if public financing doesn't come through or public incentives don't come through, because it's more likely now that they might not.
"The electorate got engaged faster than our processes caught up."
LD: We track the fights that boil over in our Contested Ground series, including projects that followed every step of the process and still got stopped. Should the industry try to wait this out?
CROWLEY: If we adjust to it in terms of our public process, it's actually a good thing, right? Because an engaged and active electorate is a good thing. That is positive for democracy. But the electorate got engaged faster than our processes caught up…
What we're now learning is that the education needs to be earlier and broader and deeper than we're used to, and that's just part of this evolution to the new reality of: people are engaged and they are skeptical. So we have to adjust to that, rather than hope it goes away…
There's weeks, if not months of work, especially for a data center, that's got to go into it ahead of time to engage the taxpayers, engage the elected officials… Ultimately, I think will be a good thing for our democracy. But it's jarring at this moment, when states and local governments are trying to further economic development.
LD: So what does CapCivic bring into that room?
CROWLEY: Peter Haney is my partner and he brings a unique blend of skills and experience to handle the public affairs and community engagement on these types of projects. We were at our last firm together, and we actually left separately, and we're doing our own things. But we were collaborating so much in the first year that we were like, "Let's just join forces," because from a public affairs standpoint, reaching people, that game has changed…
If you just go and say the right things at a public meeting, while there's more people in those meetings now, it's still not a representative sample of the community… In some ways, we're leaning on some old school methods of literally door to door knocking when there's an impact on a residential neighborhood, but then some more technology forward ways, such as social media, to reach constituents. We do some work with data centers, and with data centers, there's just a lot of time put in early on so that people understand the impacts of the projects and understand the impact of that particular project, rather than gaining their information from the national news.
LD: When we first talked last fall, you made a call on opportunity zones. Where do you think they're headed?
CROWLEY: What changed from that to now is there's more tax benefit for zones that are rural. I think what we're going to see, from a policy standpoint, is governors choosing more rural areas this time than last time because there's more benefit from it.
With the first round of OZs, we were doing a lot more urban infill type projects because that's where the zones were chosen. I think it's going to swing this time, where it's going to be much more of a site selection tool than it was last time.
LD: Last one. What do you tell people at a dinner party?
CROWLEY: If I don't feel like talking about work, I tell people I work on tax credits. That's usually a pretty quick end of that conversation.
If I do feel like talking about work, I tell them about how major corporations choose locations and how communities compete for projects. People tend to find that pretty fascinating. So I can turn the conversation on or off pretty quickly.
Kate Crowley is cofounder and president of CapCivic, which she founded in 2024 to help governments and businesses line up capital investment with civic priorities. She spent 15 years at a national accounting and advisory firm, most recently as a principal and practice leader working nationally on development finance, municipal advisory and corporate site selection. She holds a bachelor's degree in economics from the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
Across the Table is Location Decision's Q&A series with the people on both sides of location decisions. This conversation has been condensed. Know someone we should sit down with? Email [email protected].