What do Michigan Legislators and more importantly the public on both sides of the river really know about Public/Private Partnerships. Not much I will bet.
I have ranted on here how taxpayers are ripped off by P3 operators giving some of the reasons why I felt that way. I have also tried to deal with some of the arguments used by P3 sycophants to support the concept. Moreover, I have shown how politicians can become hooked by P3 cocaine.
It is much more serious an issue for us in Canada frankly because many of our Governments believe in the concept even though Auditor General Reports have demonstrated how much extra these P3 projects cost taxpayers. If you recall, the failed bridge project in British Columbia was supposed to be a P3 project but when the Government took it over and handled the financing itself, it saved about a billion taxpayer dollars even though it used the same contractors!
There really has been no debate in Michigan about whether P3′s make sense or not. In fact, the whole concept of P3′s was buried, I think deliberately, in the debate dealing with the new DRIC Bridge. If the DRIC P3 had passed, then just as surely as you are reading this Article, P3 legislation would be introduced for everything. I am sure that you remember how broadly Jenny's Bill was supposed to be in dealing with transportation facilities. It covered just about everything imaginable. All that happened was that it was now going to be a two-step process: DRIC first, everything else later.
The obvious reason as far as I'm concerned is that MDOT is looking to P3 many of the roads in Michigan in order to make what they thought would be huge windfall revenues so that they need not bother dealing with the Legislature any further with respect to budgetary matters. They would have the cash to do whatever they wanted to do received from the P3 operators without legislative oversight. They were seduced by Canada who held out the huge riches that could be made using the examples of Chicago and Indiana.
Do you really understand now why MDOT representative went to Australia to meet with people who are very familiar with P3s.
Rest here.
