That is what happened with perhaps the nation’s best-known public-private partnership, a 2006 deal in Indiana to lease an aging toll road to an investment group led by Macquarie<br />and Cintra, a Spanish infrastructure firm, for $3.8 billion, which the state used primarily for other road projects.<br />“You can make money when there’s a flood,” Ms. Warner said, criticizing the payment, “but the government looks to save lives.”<br />In New York, the Australian investment bank Macquarie — one of the biggest global funders of infrastructure projects — is working to build<br />and maintain a new Goethals Bridge to replace the span that connects Elizabeth, N. J. with Staten Island.<br />The delays on the project may well have occurred even if the government was in charge,<br />and Macquarie said public-private partnerships helped local governments avoid taking on too much debt.<br />In the United States, “the P3 market is in its infancy,” said Scott Zuchorski, a senior director in Fitch<br />Ratings’s global infrastructure group, adding that there have already been “some growing pains.”<br />In California, a public-private partnership was created to ease congestion on bumper-to-bumper State Route 91.<br />The state of Indiana had to pay the private operators of a troubled toll road — one of the first big public-private partnership deals in the country — nearly $450,000<br />because it waived tolls during a dangerous flood in order to speed escaping residents.<br />“PPPs have proven themselves to be an efficient and cost effective project delivery method, allowing state<br />and local governments to access private sector financing while effectively transferring risk,” said Geoff Segal, manager of government advisory and affairs for Macquarie Capital.
