Infra Insight Blog

Federal Transit Administration (FTA) grant recipients and the firms that work on the projects have a twenty years in the making, updated resource to assist them in one of the more complex areas of FTA projects. The FTA last week published its Buy America Handbook, which contains the FTA’s best practices for conducting pre-award and post-delivery audits for rolling stock procurements.  The Handbook replaces the FTA’s 1995 handbooks for both rail vehicles and buses and is a nonbinding guidance document for use by grant recipients, auditors, manufacturers and suppliers.

FTA’s ...

It’s been a productive time for advocates of water in the U.S. with President Obama signing into law the Water Infrastructure Improvements for the Nation Act (WIIN).  WIIN includes the Water Resources Development Act of 2016 (WRDA), together with provisions to authorize critical water projects  and improve drinking water infrastructure, water storage and supply, flood control and waterways across the nation.

A summary of some of WIIN’s key attributes are set out below:

• WIIN authorizes Congress to provide $20 million for the Water Infrastructure Finance and Innovation Act ...

The National Council for Public Private Partnerships (NCPPP) and the Kentucky Chamber of Commerce recently concluded on October 28 a very well-attended two day conference in Lexington, Kentucky on the Commonwealth’s new public-private partnership (P3) enabling legislation, the so-called "HB-309.  HB-309’s chief drafter, Rep. Leslie Combs, was on-hand, participating in nearly every panel discussion, either as a panelist or from the audience.  Rep. Combs reflected on HB-309 as if she were a proud mama, and her and fellow Kentuckians’ enthusiasm for its flexibility ...

The U.S. Department of Transportation (USDOT) is calling for project applications for $850 million in transportation infrastructure grants, representing the second opportunity for funding from a program that has already received tremendous interest from public project sponsors and the infrastructure community. The grants, announced in a Notice of Funding Opportunity posted on the USDOT website on October 28, find their genesis and funding authorization in the FAST Act (P.L. 114-94), which President Obama signed into law on December 4, 2015.

The FAST Act created a ...

Over a thousand US public finance attorneys converged on the City of Chicago last week for the annual National Association of Bond Lawyers Bond Attorneys Workshop.  The conference, the oldest and largest of its kind, featured a number of breakout sessions devoted to a wide range of issues facing the public finance legal community, including the new management contract rules recently issued by the IRS, Revenue Procedure 2016-44 .  As I wrote sometime ago, NABL was a major influence proposing changes to the rules to make them less formulaic and more flexible given the range of business ...

Public agencies with toll-setting authority should take note of a recent federal court decision relating to the uses of user fees and toll revenue, as well as the stated goals of the plaintiff in that case.

The U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York recently clarified the constitutional uses of toll revenue in American Trucking Associations v. New York State Thruway Authority, 13 Civ. 8123 (CM) (S.D.N.Y. Aug. 10, 2016). In this case, commercial trucking companies and the American Trucking Associations (ATA) claimed that the New York State Thruway Authority ...

Los Angeles World Airports (LAWA) reached a milestone in its estimated $5 billion Landside Access Modernization Program (LAMP) this week when it received statements of qualifications to design, build, finance, operate and maintain an automated people mover, in response to a request for qualifications issued by LAWA on June 9, 2016.  The five statements of qualification submitted on August 11, 2016 show significant interest by the industry in this program.  LAWA’s official press release has a complete list of the five teams.

The automated people mover, which will be approximately ...

The Regents of the University of California reached financial close on the UC Merced 2020 Project on August 16, 2016.  The project is the first higher education availability payment P3 project to be awarded in the United States, and may well serve as a template for future higher education capital projects, both within the UC system and nationally.

The Regents entered into the Project Agreement with Plenary Properties Merced LLC (PPM) for a 39-year contract term.  The PPM team includes Plenary Group, as sole equity member of PPM, Webcor Builders, as lead contractor, Skidmore, Owings & ...

The need to spend significant dollars on the repair and expansion of the nation’s public infrastructure is a major concern expressed by many.  Even the two presidential candidates for the major political parties, who don’t seem to agree on anything else, agree that a commitment to repair and rebuild the nation’s infrastructure is critical to economic productivity and opportunity for its citizens.

In a recent paper published by the Center for American Progress, a public policy and research organization, entitled Assessing Claims About Public-Private Partnerships, the ...

With the rapid pace of innovation and deployment of intelligent transportation systems (ITS) to enhance existing transportation infrastructure, transportation officials frequently procure and manage sophisticated systems that collect, use and maintain vast amounts of data. Today’s transportation officials must possess considerable technological proficiency in addition to their traditional expertise in civil engineering and construction.

Identifying technology to optimize infrastructure, and crafting complex technical specifications to procure the same, is ...