Infra Insight Blog

Guest post by Mark Romoff, President and CEO, The Canadian Council for Public-Private Partnerships

On December 9, 2014, Ontario’s Auditor General released her 2014 Annual Report, sharply criticizing Ontario’s Alternative Financing and Procurement (AFP or P3) program and suggesting a return to using the traditional method of delivering public infrastructure to achieve savings in taxpayer money.  The report expresses skepticism about the cost-saving benefits of the P3 delivery model, directly contradicting what is widely viewed by P3 players and the Canadian public ...

AASHTO is now accepting applications for the position of Director, AASHTO Project Finance Institute. The application deadline is Friday, January 2, 2015, and the full position description can be found in this AASHTO Journal entry.

In the modern U.S. history of public-private partnerships, the prevailing project delivery models have been the toll concession and the availability payment contract.  In both cases, the private party raises equity and debt financing and takes responsibility and risk for completing design, constructing and providing long-term operations and maintenance.  The major difference between the two is that in the toll concession the private party takes the revenue risk and secures its debt with project toll revenues, while the public owner takes the project revenue risk under an ...

City of Indianapolis Mayor Greg Ballard announced today that WMB Heartland Justice Partners was selected as the Preferred Offeror to design, build, finance, operate and maintain the new Marion County Consolidated Justice Facility.  WMB Heartland Justice Partners is comprised of equity members Walsh Investors, LLC, Meridiam Infrastructure Indy Justice, LLC, and Balfour Beatty Investments, Inc.

In making the announcement, Mayor Ballard said of the project: It will solve so many problems, so many problems that contribute to our existing facilities being outdated, inefficient ...

The Arizona Department of Transportation received on December 10 statements of qualifications from five teams vying for a design-build-maintain contract for the $1.9 billion Loop 202 South Mountain Freeway Project.  The submitting teams are:

1.  Connect 202 Partners

• Fluor Entreprises Inc.
• Granite Construction Co.
• Ames Construction Inc.
• Parsons Brinckerhoff Inc.
• DBi Services LLC

2.  South Mountain Mobility Group

• Dragados USA, Inc.
• Flatiron Constructors, Inc.
• Pulice Construction Inc.
• AECOM Infrastructure Inc.
• AECOM Technical Services
• ACS Infrastructure Development, Inc.

On December 9, the DC Chapter of the Women’s Transportation Seminar (WTS) held its annual holiday party and awards ceremony at the Goethe-Institut in Washington, DC.  Attending the event was U.S. Secretary of Transportation Anthony Foxx who received the Rosa Parks Diversity Leadership Award for his advocacy of the White House’s Ladders of Opportunity initiative.  In accepting the award, Secretary Foxx emphasized the importance of infrastructure to connect communities together and improve the quality of life for all Americans.

Receiving the first Man of the Year Award ...

On November 17, 2014, the California Public Employees’ Retirement System (CalPERS), the largest U.S. public pension fund with approximately $300 billion in assets, conducted its annual real assets program review. CalPERS’ real assets program includes real estate, infrastructure and forestland. According to the presentation by its investment staff, real assets’ 13.4% return outperformed the policy benchmark by 160 bps in 2013-2014 fiscal year. CalPERS’ infrastructure program has focused on both public and private infrastructure primarily in transportation ...

As part of its continuing effort to help inform and contribute to the design-build and P3 industry in the U.S., Nossaman is launching an on-going series of blog posts on Emerging Trends in Project Delivery.

Our blog posts for the industry generally are geared toward keeping our readers up to date on current developments regarding projects, programs, laws and regulations.  The Emerging Trends series will add another dimension – a look just over the horizon at what we and our guest bloggers predict may be coming, informed by prior patterns, opinions and results.  If by doing this we can ...

In the Reason Foundation’s recent Surface Transportation News #132, Robert Poole authored a blog post that discusses a report by Andrew Owen and David Levinson of the University of Minnesota Civil Engineering Department called Access Across America: Transit 2014. Their report is concerned with data on how many jobs are accessible by transit within certain time periods in 46 of the 50 largest metropolitan areas in the US.

Poole’s post analyzes both the percentage of jobs in a metropolitan area that one can reach within a given travel time, as well as the percentage of commuters ...

The Performance Based Building Coalition (PBBC) and the National Council for Public-Private Partnerships (NCPPP) together hosted the P3s for Public Buildings Summit in Miami on November 17 and 18, 2014.

One of the panels formed for the Summit reviewed Best Practices for Public Building P3 Projects: What Works and What Doesn’t? The panel was skillfully moderated by Mark Romoff, President & CEO of the Canadian Council for Public-Private Partnerships.  The panelists were  Orion Fulton, Senior Manager at Arup, Bill Maginas, Vice President at Honeywell, Douglas Scott, Senior ...