By Paul Meyer
With baseball season upon us, I can’t help but chuckle at how the bench players in baseball, full of energy and willingness to contribute, mirror private sector engineers and land surveyors who stand ready to step up and bring home Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger’s Strategic Growth Plan, which puts $15 billion into transportation improvements.
So far, like the bench players in baseball whose value isn’t recognized until late in the season, the private sector is pitching in and working on projects, but is ready to do a whole lot more.
But can the California Department of Transportation (Caltrans) deliver this monumental undertaking given the dire circumstances surrounding the state budget deficit, or is it time to call in further resources and reinforcements from the private sector?
For California, at least part of the answer can be found in the findings of a recent study called “A National Assessment of Transportation Strategies and Practices: Lessons for California.” The joint study, conducted by the California Taxpayers’ Association (Cal-Tax) and the Infrastructure Delivery Council (IDC), an affiliate of the Consulting Engineers and Land Surveyors of California (CELSOC), examined the best practices of the departments of transportation in 10 states with major transportation programs already underway including Arizona, Florida, Georgia, Missouri, New York, Oregon, Texas, Utah, Washington, and California.
A pivotal fact revealed in the study was that California’s ability to successfully deliver these projects is currently hamstrung by the state’s fundamental underutilization of a cardinal element of modern infrastructure delivery methods – the public-private partnership (PPP) model.
California, unlike the other nine states surveyed, has failed to recognize that outsourcing engineering services on these projects actually leads to expedited delivery times in addition to saving taxpayer money.
The study found that Georgia, Missouri and Washington are outsourcing their engineering services on 50 percent of their projects. In Arizona, private sector experts are utilized at levels closer to 85 percent. California outsourced just 10 percent of its transportation projects,
Keeping in mind that time is money; these statistics underscore the importance of the private sector’s role in successfully delivering transportation programs faster, more efficiently, and most importantly cost effectively.
But the decision to outsource is not made solely on cost. One significant factor in deciding to outsource is driven by a targeted project delivery time. A recent look at Utah’s Mountain View Corridor project shows that due to inflation rates as high as 10 percent in recent years, delays are raising the cost of the $2 billion project by $200 million a year.
We agree with the state Department of Finance, which reports that California needs an estimated $500 billion just to bring current its aging infrastructure systems. And, using Utah’s Mountain View Corridor project as an example, we can reasonably deduce that every year our infrastructure projects remain on the shelf, the increased cost of those delays to California taxpayers will be hundreds of millions, if not billions of dollars.
PPPs, as other states continue to demonstrate, are a cost-effective, efficient means of delivering infrastructure both quickly and professionally. During the 1930s-1950s visionary leadership was able to deliver a massive transportation program with limited inclusion of the private sector. But times have changed and departments of transportation (DOTs) across the country find it difficult the ability to hire, train and maintain large, fluctuating staffing levels needed to support these programs. In addition, DOTs often lack the specialty skills needed to engineer increasingly complex projects.
Private engineering firms and engineers can be used to fill the current and future gaps in staffing levels and specialty skills our state needs to succeed. But today in California, the lack of an adequate statutory framework for authorizing PPPs is “blocking the road.” Without new legislation, wide-scale authorization and implementation of PPPs in California is simply not going to happen.
Take the Golden Gate Bridge project for example. This highly successful project was structured as a PPP long before the term became popular. But the statute that authorized that landmark PPP project only authorized that one project. Our hope is that current efforts by Gov. Schwarzenegger and a new generation of visionary leaders across the state will succeed in their quest to enable California to finally bring its systems and processes in-line with twenty-first century practices.
The taxpayers who will eventually foot the bill for California’s underinvestment deserve nothing less than to have the best players from both the public and private sectors working together to rebuild our state.
It’s time for the public sector in California to call the private sector off the bench and into the game. We need to put our best team on the field and allow them to get to work rebuilding California’s infrastructure and economy.
For a copy of the full study, visit www.caltax.org.
For more information on PPPs visit www.celsoc.org
Paul Meyer is the executive director of CELSOC, which is a 52-year old, statewide association representing 1,200 private consulting engineering and land surveying firms that average 20 employees each. CELSOC is dedicated to enhancing the consulting engineering and land surveying professions, protecting the general public and promoting the use of the private sector in the growth and development of our state. CELSOC’s members provide services for all phases of planning, designing and constructing projects. For more information, visit www.celsoc.org.
