By Bob Prieto, Senior Vice President, Fluor
Public-Private Partnerships (PPPs) are an increasingly attractive tool for infrastructure development in the United States. Recent legislative changes in SAFETEA-LU have provided the States new tools to foster development and new opportunities for contractors and developers to participate in emerging opportunities to design, build, finance, and operate tomorrow's transportation infrastructure.
However, the PPP process is not "business as usual" for either the public sector or the traditional service providers that have served the industry over the years. For the public sector a new regulatory design is required to meet the challenges PPPs present while realizing the opportunities they hold. For the Contractor/Developer the risks are higher as are the rewards - but only if a deliberate process is employed. Regulators and Contractor/Developers must understand each other's needs and processes. This paper offers a "How To" Guide from the Contractor/Developer's perspective to facilitate this understanding and to begin surfacing the myriad of issues that must be considered.
Key questions that drive the overall process are:
• Does a potential project exist?
• Will stakeholders support the project?
• Will it make financial sense?
• Is the regulatory framework well designed?
The process for answering these questions is outlined in the following sections, together with some second order questions that must be satisfactorily answered to having a profitable PPP. This "How To" Guide is not intended as a cookie-cutter approach to PPP development but as a framework around which market and project specific approaches can be built.