Adding it all up, Infrastructure Ontario saw "tremendous opportunity" to save taxpayers money, Georgiou said. A value for money analysis conducted by consultancy Deloitte and Touche confirmed that the project generates savings to the province, though Infrastructure Ontario could not yet release them publicly.
The savings were made possible because the winning proponent, Hochtief-backed Shield Infrastructure Partnership, included a diverse grouping of local contractors spread across the province.
"A typical project like this would probably be in the 36-month schedule," Georgiou said. "Because of their partners across the province, we feel that's one of the reasons why 27 months was the schedule [for this project]."
Regional representation also helped Hochtief win the project in the first place - its second in North America, after the Alberta Schools PPP. Infrastructure Ontario rated regional representation very highly because, in addition to the synergies from bringing local know-how to the project, "it's also seen as a way for communities to have ownership of development in their back yard," Georgiou said. That leads to employment, industry growth and pride in the infrastructure that's being developed across the province, he added.
The project was also notable from a financial standpoint. After the fallout from the financial crisis in 2008, "a lot of the international banks decided to stop participating in the PPP market and in long-term financing solutions," Georgiou said. Yet they squarely re-emerged in this project: at financial close in September, three German banks - KfW IPEX-Bank, WestLB and Nord/LB - provided $53 million in short term construction financing and $110 million in long term (30 year) financing for a total of $163
million. It was the clearest return yet to the long-tenor, European bank-led financings that were much more prevalent in Ontario before the crisis.
Hochtief and local partner Concert Real Estate Corporation provided $18 million of equity toward the project on a 50-50 basis. As with the local contracting partners, the participation of Concert, a Canadian property investor, also weighed positively for the Shield Infrastructure Partnership.
"The team was very representative of Ontario," Georgiou said.