Florida has pretty good infrastructure, but also very rapid economic, population, and tourism growth. So it needs a lot more infrastructure. With Trump promising a major federal infrastructure initiative with a big reliance on public-private partnerships, I wrote a column exploring some of the implications for Florida.
Globally and in several dozen U.S. projects, P3s have an impressive track record with benefits including:
• Major investments much sooner, thanks to ready access to capital;
• A demonstrated track record of largely on-time completion;
• Innovation that reduces costs and/or improves performance;
• Lower life-cycle cost, since projects are designed to be efficiently maintained;
• Transfer of major risks (cost overruns, traffic shortfalls, etc.) from taxpayers to investors.
While much of our infrastructure continues to deteriorate, the United States continues to miss out on much of these benefits. In transportation alone, $160 billion of P3 projects have happened in Canada, Europe, Latin America and the United States in the past five years. But only 12.5% of that has been in this country. Trump’s infrastructure plan aims to reduce the federal barriers that make it difficult or expensive to do such projects here.
Fortunately, Florida is already a national leader in the successful use of P3s. Pew Charitable Trusts put together the accompanying map based on data from the National Conference of State Legislatures. It shows Florida has one of the most constructive legal frameworks for P3s in the nation. That framework covers housing, water and transportation projects, and enables cities, counties and school boards to use P3s as well.
Read the rest here.