• Posts by Geoffrey S. Yarema
    Partner

    Founder and former chairman of Nossaman’s Infrastructure Group, Geoffrey Yarema has spent more than three decades developing national best practices for innovative procurement, contracting and financing structures that ...

Posted in Financing

The Angels® Flight Railway Foundation, represented by Nossaman LLP and Shumaker Mallory LLP, reached a historic agreement with a team led by ACS Group and including Sener Engineering and Systems, to put the iconic Angels Flight® Railway in downtown Los Angeles back into service by this coming Labor Day.

The agreement utilizes a public-private partnership to restore the Railway to passenger service, through full-scale modernization and state-of-the-art safety improvements, and to operate and maintain it to industry standards for 30 years. Borrowing  a revenue risk concession ...

For years, policymakers and economists around the country have been well aware that the federal gas tax is dying.

In its report to Congress, the National Surface Transportation Infrastructure Financing Commission, on which I was honored to serve, made clear that we must replace the 18.4 cent federal gas tax with other means of funding transportation in order to maintain and improve our highways, bridges and transit systems in the United States.

The commission recommended a road user charge as the most effective approach to solving this problem.

[If] we fail to address the immediate ...

Posted in Airports, News

Los Angeles World Airports (LAWA) staff today briefed its Board of Airport Commissioners on its plans to deliver and finance the estimated $5 billion Landside Access Modernization Program (LAMP) at Los Angeles International Airport (LAX).  LAMP includes several elements, including an elevated 2.25-mile automated people mover (APM), a consolidated rent-a-car facility (ConRAC), parking garages, pedestrian bridges to airport terminals and roadway improvements.  The APM will have several stops between LAX’s Central Terminal Area and the new ConRAC, including a stop at a ...

Posted in Design-Build

As long time participants in the alternative delivery sector know, the Design-Build Institute of America has from its earliest days sought to set forth guiding principles that would be universally applicable across all sectors--no small task. At its annual conference this week in Las Vegas, Mike Loulakis and Diane Hoag presented the latest revised draft of its recommended best practices, called "Design-Build Done Right."

While the organization expects these principles to evolve and be refined over time, it is seeking comments on this new version before November 15, 2013. The ...

Posted in P3s

As the 2013 award season heats up for 2012 successes around the world, the juries are increasingly finding the US market hard to ignore. Infrastructure Journal and PPP Bulletin International, the two London-based media organizations that annually recognize top projects and industry organizations worldwide, have each announced their finalists for this year's best transportation transactions and firms. Focusing on public-private partnership projects as opposed to those mega-projects which are the subject of major design-build contracts, these organizations ...

Posted in Policy

This morning, members of the National Surface Transportation Infrastructure Financing Commission and National Transportation Policy Project of the Bipartisan Policy Center released a joint statement urging Congress to take steps toward several transportation policy principles designed to help guide deliberations over how to extend, fund and improve the federal surface transportation program in the face of dire fiscal realities. Some of the key proposals include the call for Congress to incentivize and remove barriers to increased state and local revenues from direct user ...

Posted in Policy

AASHTO recently sponsored a Congressional Forum on funding and financing surface transportation in the coming decade.  Academic co-sponsors were America 2050 at the Regional Plan Association; Fels Institute of Government at the University of Pennsylvania; Georgia Institute of Technology; Humphrey Institute at the University of Minnesota; Keston Institute of Infrastructure and Public; Finance at the University of Southern California.

Over 25 staff members of Senate and House committees participated.  John Horsley, Executive Director of AASHTO, made one of the ...

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Tags: AASHTO, Policy
Posted in Policy

The National Journal Transportation Expert Blog this week asked whether states should be allowed to commercialize rest stops.  I thought this was a timely question, and responded with the following:

The upcoming reauthorization will present an excellent opportunity for Congress to rethink its outdated blanket prohibition on the commercialization of state-owned safety rest stops.

This is no longer simply a question of who gets to sell fast food to weary travelers. The question is: how will we maintain our interstates to truly serve motorists’ changing needs at a time when ...

The IBTTA is discussing the future of tolling existing interstate capacity in light of the Federal Highway Administration’s decision to reject Pennsylvania’s application to toll Interstate 80.

My opinion?

The political barriers to tolling existing interstate capacity are just as real and monumental as raising the gas tax. In the short to mid term the more likely scenario is an acceleration of the trend to toll new capacity within existing interstate rights of way. The Ft. Lauderdale I-595, the Ft. Worth North Tarrant Express, and the Dallas I-635 are all recent examples of ...

Nossaman’s 30-plus infrastructure attorneys offer clients, colleagues, strategic partners and industry media a wealth of practical experience, insider insight and thoughtful analysis here on Infra Insight. We blog about what we know best, from industry-leading procurements to local and national policy developments that affect the market and our clients.

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