Posted on 11/11/2016 8:22:30 PM PST by Tolerance Sucks Rocks
The Commonwealth of Virginia awarded procurement of its Transform66 Outside the Beltway project to I-66 Express Mobility Partners, a consortium of private companies, Virginia Gov. Terry McAuliffe announced on Nov. 3.
I-66 Express Mobility Partners, which consists of transportation infrastructure company Cintra, public infrastructure investment firm Meridiam, and the contractors Ferrovial Agroman US and Allan Myers VA, Inc., will be responsible for financing, designing, building, maintaining and operating the interstate expansion.
The Virginia Department of Transportation’s (VDOT) Transform66 Outside the Beltway project will add two express lanes in each direction between I-495 and Gainesville along with three general purpose lanes in both directions.
The project also includes new transit service and parking lots as well as safety and operational improvements at interchanges.
I-66 Express Mobility Partners won the project bid after beating fellow finalist Express Partners, another consortium led by toll road manager Transurban, in both technical and financial criteria used to evaluate proposals through VDOT’s new public-private partnership (P3) procurement process.
“It was a competitively scored bid through the entire process,” Virginia Secretary of Transportation Aubrey Layne said. “Cintra won both the technical score…and they offered the best financial terms and lowest public subsidy to the Commonwealth. They won on both of those counts.”
Layne added that this was the first procurement completed under the reformed P3 system, which scores proposals on cost and technical factors, such as customer service, structure durability, tolling and public outreach work, according to the presentation that the secretary delivered to the P3 advisory committee during its Nov. 3 meeting at the VDOT Central Office auditorium in Richmond.
According to Layne, the Express Mobility Partners proposal stood out because the companies involved offered dedicated, accommodating customer service, as well as a commitment to essentially rebuild the expanded section of I-66 so that it will still be in good condition when the state takes over the express toll lanes at the end of the 50-year contract.
The terms negotiated between Express Mobility Partners and the state also specified that the private-sector group will be responsible for all design, construction, maintenance and operation costs for the I-66 express lanes.
Layne estimates that the total project cost will come out to around $2.5 billion. Not only will it involve no state funds, but Express Mobility Partners will also give the Commonwealth $500 million as a concession at the financial close, which is expected to come around the summer of 2017.
According to a press release from the Office of the Secretary of Transportation, the terms also directed Express Mobility Partners to contribute $800 million over the next 50 years to transit projects in the I-66 corridor and $350 million to the Northern Virginia Transportation Authority (NVTA) for future projects aimed at congestion relief in the corridor.
“We are extremely excited to become a part of the Northern Virginia community,” Patrick Rhode, Cintra’s U.S. vice president of corporate affairs, said. “We’re very proud and honored to have the confidence of the commonwealth as we invest more than $3 billion in Virginia’s infrastructure.”
A subsidiary of the Madrid, Spain-based company Ferrovial, Cintra’s American projects are primarily concentrated in Texas, where its U.S. headquarters are located in Austin. The I-66 project marks its first venture in Virginia.
Before VDOT selected I-66 Express Mobility Partners as its preferred proposer, the labor union UNITE HERE, which merged the Union of Needletrades, Industrial and Textile Employees (UNITE) with the Hotel Employees and Restaurant Employees International Union (HERE), released a report titled “Ferrovial: The Road to Bankruptcy, High Tolls and Public Controversy.”
UNITE HERE primarily represents workers in the hospitality industry, including workers in airports and other transportation centers. The union started researching Ferrovial after the infrastructure and services operator won a bid to upgrade the Denver International Airport’s main terminal on July 1.
“In the process of engaging with them there, we started to look more broadly at the company’s past work,” UNITE HERE research analyst Arthur Phillips, who wrote the report, said. “Some concerns that we had in Denver around transparency were reminiscent of things that we’ve seen in other projects, which led us to take a look at the company further.”
Published in October, Phillips’s report found that two of Ferrovial’s U.S.-based projects had filed for bankruptcy.
According to The Texas Tribune, SH 130 Concession Company, a partnership between Cintra and the San Antonia-based Zachry American Infrastructure, filed for bankruptcy on Mar. 2, less than three years after opening a 41-mile-long section of the Texas State Highway 130 toll road in 2012.
The Wall Street Journal reported on Sept. 22, 2014 that Indiana Toll Road operator ITR Concession Co. LLC, which was owned by Ferrovial and Australian investment bank Macquarie Group Ltd., had filed for bankruptcy the previous day. Cintra and a Macquarie subsidiary had paid Indiana $3.8 billion for the right to operate the 157-mile road in 2006.
Cintra also encountered difficulties in North Carolina when lawmakers and residents expressed opposition to a subsidiary’s agreement with the North Carolina Department of Transportation to widen Interstate 77 with 26 miles of toll lanes.
A bipartisan bill to cancel the contract with I-77 Mobility Partners passed North Carolina’s House by an 87-21 vote before failing in the senate when Republican senators opted not to vote on the bill, according to The Charlotte Observer.
Phillips said that he spoke to some VDOT officials and lawmakers about his report and felt that they took it into account.
Sec. Layne says that, while he read the report, it didn’t contain any information that was new to the department.
He also noted that Transurban, which operates the I-495 high-occupancy toll (HOT) lanes, has seen its share of failed projects, including Virginia’s Route 895, also known as the Pocahontas Parkway.
An 8.8-mile-long, four-lane toll road connecting southern Chesterfield with eastern Henrico, the Pocahontas Parkway was acquired by Transurban in May 2006 for $611 million. By June 2012, Transurban wrote down its stake in the roadway and reportedly considered bankruptcy before eventually giving up ownership in 2013 to cover its debts.
“We did our due diligence,” Layne said. “Both teams had some negative things, some very positive things, but we researched them all.”
Rhode dismissed the report’s findings by citing Ferrovial’s longevity and market value, which Forbes put at $15.6 billion as of May 2016, as well as its inclusion in the Dow Jones Sustainability Index for 15 consecutive years.
The Dow Jones Sustainability Index tracks the stock performance of companies based on various economic, environmental and social factors, and Ferrovial was the only Spanish company in its industry that was included in the 2016 world and European indices, according to a Ferrovial press release published on Aug. 9.
“We believe that Ferrovial’s tremendous reputation over numerous decades more than speaks to itself,” Rhode said.
The Transform66 Outside the Beltway project’s commercial close, essentially when VDOT and Express Mobility Partners will finalize their contract, is expected to come around the middle of December, according to Layne.
The project has its financial close about six months after the commercial close, and construction will likely start in late 2017.
Layne says that the project design could still change, but only to “benefit the people in the corridor,” since the department can’t introduce any new right-of-way takes.
Though no dates have been scheduled yet, VDOT will hold public hearings throughout the next year as the design and construction process begins.
“We’ll have a special team that works directly with the impacted residents and gets their input all during construction,” Layne said. “There will be lots of public input starting next spring when the deal is finally signed and the construction and design begins.”
Cintra is like a hydra - you chop off one head and it simply grows another. How many times does the public have to get SCREWED by these ‘private’, monopoly, toll roads?
These are actually express lanes that will be built on I-66. If you don’t want to pay the toll, you can take the free lanes. I have no idea whether there is a non-compete agreement in this PPP.
We are looking at an environment where we will have to pay literally hundreds of dollars to drive across this nation if we aren’t careful.
What this amounts to is guess what...
Getting us out of our cars. It’s planned to do just that.
We pay gas taxes damn it. Why isn’t that money spent on highways?
This is total F’ing bull s—t!
Except it appears that they are taking one of the free lanes away in each direction from route 50 out.
all interstates should be privatized - there is zero reason the federal government should be involved with highways.
federal gas tax should be eliminated and interstates privatized
Well, on what terms, those of turning the overall interstate system into toll roads? That’s a perennial libertarian idea, but some works do carry on better as public works.
The real bottleneck is inside the beltway where there are just two lanes and they have a separate project to turn that into HOT lanes completely at rush hour which will make them tons and tons of money: http://inside.transform66.org Right now those are two HOV lanes and before the big increase in HOV fines you would see a ton of mercedes-driving lobbyists paying the small fine as a sort of toll. The regulars would get caught all the time and pay the fine all the time. McAwful and others realized that this would be a great source of regular income for someone and that someone will probably be a friend of McAwful. The eventual HOT lanes inside the beltway may not be too crowded but the tolls will be huge. Federal taxpayers will pay some of those tolls via some sort of rebate for the elite federal workers.
It doesn’t really bother me to pay tools but there will be no possibility for the working poor to pay them in this case. The HOT lanes will be the Lexus lanes.
I hope Trump DOES NOT resort to Transurban-type privatized toll roads, like around Washingtoon DC. This uses govt’s eminent domain power for private gain. Highways are a public good. The highway system should be FREEWAYs, but even if they are TOLLWAYS with E-Z pass type systems, they need to be public owned not private owned. Once these private systems are installed, eventually they will lead to politicians allowing the parallel public highways to deteriorate — forcing people to the expensive private roads. This is all part of the NWO agenda strategy of fleecing the sheeple with a death of a thousand cuts. It is similar to the Climate change carbon tax where, although it taxes “carbon” they have finally figured out a way to implement the age-old objective of “taxing the air we breathe.”
“all interstates should be privatized - there is zero reason the federal government should be involved with highways.”
You do understand that toll rates pushing 50 cents per mile and more exist on some already-existing private highways, and more than 20 cents per mile is now COMMON on those types of highways. And that’s just the beginning - once they get their stranglehold on ground transportation, then they’re really TURN THE SCREWS on drivers.
We drive 20,000 miles a year, and I don’t have the extra $4k to $10k laying around to pay those politically-connected oligarchs, but if you do, then more power to you.
I prefer my 2 cent per mile gas tax, as $400 per year is a LOT EASIER for this FReeper to afford.
“These are actually express lanes that will be built on I-66. If you don’t want to pay the toll, you can take the free lanes. I have no idea whether there is a non-compete agreement in this PPP.”
Thanks Tol, I was struggling to make sense of the article, particularly the part about them rebuilding 3 general purpose lanes in each direction without tolling them. Regarding non-compete, as long as they own the free lanes (and thus can keep them from expanding), they effectively have the monopoly they need to force traffic onto their toll lanes.
Interesting approach, but should be quite rewarding for them.
you realize you are asking for a socialist subsidy ?
YEP!!! I will take Socialism over CRONY CAPITALIST MONOPOLIES any day of the week (or year), especially given the track record of these insider scams.
why don’t you take surface streets or otherwise avoid the crony capitalists ?
What’s in it for you? It was proven that the Red Light Camera supporters wound up being paid by the companies...astroturfing.
So it’s difficult for me (and many of us here) to give credibility to people who claim to support this level of cronyism...as it’s almost certainly more astroturfing.
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