Any transportation planning exercise involves public participation to varying degrees. PPPs are new, and there are so many misconceptions about how they really work. Therefore, public participation in PPP projects is even more important.
The decisions surrounding the long-term lease of the Indiana Toll Road to a private concessionaire was the subject of intense debate and controversy both during and after the actual transaction. There are conflicting accounts on how well the public was kept informed about the facts of the transaction. Some legislature members complained that the deal was done in "secrecy" (GAO 2000b). That the Daniels administration held hearings after formally announcing the lease was also a subject of legislative criticism (Replogle 2007). On the other hand, staff from the Indiana DOT and the Indiana Finance Authority who were interviewed for the USC study (Buxbaum and Ortiz 2007) indicated that legislative hearings were held between January and March 2006, as part of the process to create enabling legislation for the Indiana Toll Road concession, and these hearings were open to the public. After PPP legislation approving the deal was enacted, additional hearings were conducted in Indianapolis and in the area where the toll road is located.
The perception of a lack of transparency has plagued other recent PPP deals, (e.g., the SH-130 in Texas), but after the public backlash, some PPP proponents and decision makers took notice and are making an effort to communicate and involve the public in the process. In New Jersey, the governor began to explore the feasibility of leasing public assets, including toll roads, eventually moving to pursue an asset monetization through the creation of a public corporation. The study conducted to develop the asset monetization plan was kept "under wraps" for several months, and legislators demanded that the administration make the study public, even resorting to court action, after being denied access to the report. The governor released his plan during his State of the State address in January 2008, and in an effort to gain support, the administration held public meetings in each county to present the plan.
Almost 60% of the respondents (26 states) in our state DOT survey consider the lack of opportunities for public input as a "very important" concern. Only 7% (three states) considered this issue to be "not important," all three of which are not considering highway PPPs.
As mentioned earlier, several respondents of our interested parties' survey included transparency as one of the main concerns and factors to consider in a PPP, citing items such as public access to concession documents, applying the same standards of public disclosure in the public sector to private entities in a PPP, delineation/limitations of what is proprietary information and what is not in the contract, and public oversight at all stages (i.e., from procurement, throughout construction, and operations of facility).
According to the recent GAO report on long-term concessions (GAO 2000b), both Victoria and New South Wales, in Australia, require transparency in their PPP process, by keeping the public informed, as laid out in the public interest criteria shown previously in Table 4.