Infra Insight Blog

On January 17, 1994, a 6.7 magnitude earthquake struck Northridge, California, resulting in thousands of casualties and approximately $60 billion in damages and economic loss. Hospitals within the impacted area suffered severe structural damage and many became inoperable. Recognizing the insufficiency of the existing seismic safety standards for hospitals, the state of California signed Senate Bill 1953 (SB 1953) into law in September 1994.

SB 1953, also known as the Hospital Seismic Retrofit Program, established the following deadlines by which all California general ...

Much has been said already about President Trump's call to "rebuild our crumbling infrastructure," in his first State of the Union address. The President asked Congress to advance a $1.5 trillion infrastructure plan that, in part, should be "leveraged by partnering with state and local governments and, where appropriate, tapping into private sector investment."

But not all "crumbling infrastructure" is state and local infrastructure. The federal government's infrastructure also needs attention (e.g., river locks, some dams and levees, federal buildings, etc.). In late ...

The UC Merced 2020 Project was a big winner at P3 Bulletin’s annual P3 Awards ceremony held in Washington D.C. last month, claiming the Gold Award for Best Social Infrastructure Project, along with the Silver Award in the Government Agency of the Year category. The award comes approximately one year after the historic groundbreaking on the project, which is currently under construction.

The project consists of the comprehensive development, design, construction, financing, operations, and maintenance of academic, administrative, research, recreational, student ...

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 ...

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 ...

The inaugural P3s for Public Buildings Summit will be held on November 17-18, 2014 at the Hyatt Regency in Miami, FL. The summit will be hosted by the National Council for Public-Private Partnerships and the Performance Based Building Coalition.

The summit will explore ways that P3s can be developed and implemented to replace the nation’s deteriorating public buildings, including schools, hospitals, courthouses, universities, police stations and prisons.

• Topics of discussion will include:
• Financing of projects;
• Federal policy challenges and solutions;
• Case studies of ...

As demand for government services continues to grow across the United States, federal, state and local government agencies must identify innovative and cost effective methods to deliver essential social infrastructure. While many agencies are interested in pursuing innovative P3 delivery models to procure public buildings, they often lack the clear necessary legislation to authorize P3 deals.

We offer below, for consideration and comment, a draft model social infrastructure P3 bill.  We developed the draft legislation based on our experience advising US public agencies ...

On March 4, 2014, the City of Indianapolis announced that three development teams have been short-listed to compete to design, build, finance, operate and maintain a new Marion County Consolidated Justice Facility.  Replacing existing facilities, the proposed new facility will consolidate various aging and inefficient facilities throughout the county, and may house separate adult and juvenile detention, inmate processing, the prosecutor, public defender, probation and community corrections, clerk, coroner, crime lab and other state and federal agencies.  The new complex ...

California Senate Bill 593 (SB 593), introduced by Senator Ted Lieu (D-Torrance), shows the interest of some State legislators in implementing performance-based infrastructure (PBI) in social programs.

SB 593 would require the California Office of Planning and Research to administer a Social Impact Partnership Pilot Program (the Pilot Program) beginning in 2015.  The Pilot Program would authorize the Director of the Office of Planning and Research (Director) to identify and submit proposed social impact partnerships to the California Legislature for its consideration each ...

If you want to know what a mature, effective federal and state P3 policy can look like, we need not look very far beyond our U.S. borders.  Two Canadian provinces, Ontario and British Columbia, provide us a road map for building successful, sustainable P3 programs and policies.

At the International Bridge Conference in Pittsburgh last month, panelists for a workshop on P3s, including Len Kozachuk with Infrastructure Ontario (IO), described the essential features of this agency and its alternative financing and procurement program.  The contrast with how our federal and state policy ...

Posted by guest blogger Ryan J. Orr

A recently published paper analyzes returns on infrastructure investments and produces some rather surprising findings. The paper, Risk, Return and Cash Flow Characteristics of Infrastructure Fund Investments by Florian Bitsch, Axel Buchner, and Christoph Kaserer, examines an extensive dataset of infrastructure and non-infrastructure deals and finds that the data does not back up the conventional wisdom that infrastructure investments offer long-term, stable and predictable, inflation-linked returns with low correlation to other ...