As part of its effort to meet MAP-21’s legislative requirement to develop “standard public-private partnership transaction model contracts for the most popular types of public-private partnerships,” the Federal Highway Administration held a “listening session” with representatives from the transportation industry at the U.S. Department of Transportation in Washington D.C. on January 16.  Representatives from state departments of transportation, general contractors, trade associations, legal advisors and others were in attendance, and solicited to provide FHWA with the P3 community’s view of what the model contracts should be. 

In her introductory remarks, the Hon. Beth Osborne, Deputy Assistant Secretary of Transportation for Policy, saw the effort as “compiling best practices” of the P3 community, but one for which FHWA did not have “pre-conceived notions.”  FHWA and USDOT representatives spent the better part of four hours hearing out the industry’s hopes for, expectations about and cautionary recommendations regarding FHWA’s final product.  The resounding theme of the audience comments was that “every P3 is different,” FHWA’s effort should tilt toward educating public sponsors as to the project-specific risk-sharing and “value-for-money” considerations that makes a P3 an effective delivery tool, and FHWA should refrain from prescribing risk allocations or other contract terms.

In a companion effort, FHWA is also beta-testing an interactive model, which intends both to help educate public sponsors in alternative procurement strategies (like the public-private partnership (“P3”)) “apples to apples” comparison with conventional procurements).  The “P3-VALUE Toolkit” collects project sponsors’ (and their consultants’) project-specific risks, quantifies their value, and, with other financing assumptions and project-specific parameters considered, produces a snapshot of the value-for-money that a P3 strategy may or may not present for that project.  FHWA held an initial roll-out “webinar” of the draft toolkit on January 10, with a follow-up webinar session on January 24.

FHWA has set up a docket, Federal Register No. FHWA-2012-0126, to collect industry comments by May 31, to keep pace with the rigorous requirement of MAP-21 to produce and promulgate model contracts by December 31, 2013.