Tag: Public private partnerships
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More P3s Coming. Taxpayers, Hang onto Your Wallets
by Randy Salzman The history of American transportation “public private partnerships” indicates that virtually all P3 shell companies go bankrupt before paying back federal loans and the “private activity bonds” which they sold to finance part of the debt. When these firms go bankrupt, who loses? Taxpayers. We get stuck (1) with paying back the…
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P3 Mirage
by Randy Salzman With recent reporting about Norfolk’s ERC (Elizabeth River Crossings) public private partnership (P3) on top of extensive coverage of the 460 Toll Road debacle, Virginians should begin questioning “privatization” of public infrastructure. The data is clear. The privatization of highways has not been “capitalists’ gifts to taxpayers,” as press releases have implied.…
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McAuliffe Adminstration Gives P3s a Second Chance
by James A. Bacon The McAuliffe administration has spent much of its first two years unwinding the legacy of botched and controversial public private partnerships inked by the McDonnell administration: radically truncating the plan to to build a U.S. connector between Petersburg and Suffolk, and revising significantly the tolling for Norfolk’s Midtown-Downtown tunnel project. Now, after the enactment of…
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Layne’s Law
by James A. Bacon After spending a year and a half cleaning up the mess left by the previous administration — the Charlottesville Bypass, Norfolk’s Midtown-Downtown Tunnel, the U.S. 460 Connector in Tidewater — Transportation Secretary Aubrey Layne now has the opportunity to show whether or not he has the chops to handle a complex, politically…
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Layne's Law
by James A. Bacon After spending a year and a half cleaning up the mess left by the previous administration — the Charlottesville Bypass, Norfolk’s Midtown-Downtown Tunnel, the U.S. 460 Connector in Tidewater — Transportation Secretary Aubrey Layne now has the opportunity to show whether or not he has the chops to handle a complex, politically…
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Coping with Risk in Highway Megaprojects
by James A. Bacon As Transportation Secretary Aubrey Layne has had more time to dig into his job, he has developed an ever more nuanced appreciation of how things went wrong with the U.S. 460 Connector. There was more to the fiasco, which could cost the Commonwealth up to $300 million, than a simple failure to acquire…
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Juggling Risk on Interstate 66
by James A. Bacon The specter of the botched U.S. 460 project will be hovering over the Commonwealth Transportation Board (CTB) today as Transportation Secretary Aubrey Layne updates the board about project financing for Interstate 66 outside the Washington Capital Beltway, expected to cost in the realm of $2 billion. Del. Greg Habeeb, R-Salem, set…
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Portsmouth Takes a Hit from Tunnel Construction
by James A. Bacon The City of Portsmouth has been clobbered by the imposition of tolls on the Midtown Tunnel and Downtown Tunnel connecting the city to Norfolk, and hammered again by construction-related disruptions to service on the tunnels. Combined, the impact of tolls and disruption have reduced quarterly taxable sales by $24 million annually, materially…
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Injecting the “Public” Back into Public-Private Partnerships
We haven’t heard much about Public-Private Partnerships since the days of the McDonnell administration, which touted P3s as a tool for leveraging limited state transportation funding into more road and rail construction. The problem with the McDonnell team’s reliance on P3s wasn’t the grand strategy but the execution. The tolling of the Downtown-Midtown Tunnel in…
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Injecting the "Public" Back into Public-Private Partnerships
We haven’t heard much about Public-Private Partnerships since the days of the McDonnell administration, which touted P3s as a tool for leveraging limited state transportation funding into more road and rail construction. The problem with the McDonnell team’s reliance on P3s wasn’t the grand strategy but the execution. The tolling of the Downtown-Midtown Tunnel in…
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Building the New Midtown Tunnel
Building the new Midtown Tunnel between Norfolk and Portsmouth is one of the more spectacular engineering feats ever attempted in Virginia. Elizabeth River Crossings (ERC), the private-sector partner in charge of the $1.5 billion construction project, has to dredge a 95-foot-deep trench in the Elizabeth River, float 11 massive concrete tubes the length of football…
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Highway Robbery
by James A. Bacon I’ve always considered Transurban, operator of the express lanes on the Interstate 495 and Interstate 95, to be a pretty savvy outfit. The company may have over-estimated traffic demand for its express lanes when deciding back in the mid-2000s to build the Northern Virginia toll operations, but corporate executives seemed highly professional in the…
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Optimism Bias and Risk in Public Private Partnerships
by James A. Bacon Randy Salzman, a free-lance Charlottesville writer, has spent the last couple of years trying to understand how Public Private Partnerships (P3s) work in Virginia. If the private sector is supposed to be so much more efficient than government, he asks, how come so many big P3 transportation projects in Virginia and across…
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U.S. 460: Peeling Back the Onion
by James A. Bacon Structuring the U.S. 460 Connector as a public-private partnership (P3) shielded the $1.4 billion project from much of the oversight required for conventional Virginia Department of Transportation (VDOT) projects, found a confidential report by VDOT’s Assurance Compliance Division and the Office of the State Inspector General. As a consequence, the McDonnell administration…
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Quote of the Day: Doug Koelemay
As it appears increasingly likely that Congress will throttle the flow of federal transportation dollars to the states, state officials are looking at alternative financing mechanisms such as Public Private Partnerships (P3s). As it happens, Virginia is one of only four states with extensive experience with P3s — the others are California, Texas and Florida…