Commentary

Getting Infrastructure Partnerships Right

It’s encouraging to see that statehouses in both Ohio and Illinois are making significant progress this legislative session on enacting new laws to facilitate infrastructure public-private partnerships (PPPs). As I wrote in my new commentary on the development of Ohio’s PPP legislation:

Governments around the world have shown they can partner with private firms to finance and develop new highways, bridges and other infrastructure vital to our economy. Public-private partnerships offer a way to bring new sources of capital to the table as “traditional” sources like fuel taxes and government borrowing dry up in an increasingly challenging fiscal environment.

The piece goes on to offer two key suggestions to improve the current language on PPPs in active legislation in Ohio (House Bill 153). Namely, I recommend: (1) the establishment of a PPP “center of excellence” to evaluate, select and conduct due diligence on potential PPP projects, and (2) expanding the scope of PPP authority beyond just transportation projects to schools, hospitals and other social infrastructure projects, as Virginia, Puerto Rico, many Canadian and Australian provinces, the UK and others have done.

Reason Foundation has advocated PPPs for decades, and given the emerging interest in this issue in the aforementioned states and others, I thought it might be useful to compile links to some of our additional reading on the subject for those interested in more details, best practices and myths-vs-facts on this exciting policy innovation:

And for some useful additional reading, see: