>>>Amazing how Republicans, more than Democrats, eat this PPP crap up, thinking that they’re actually doing some good.
On the other hand, without the P3 funding plan, these new lanes would not be under construction. Reliance on state funding would have delayed the project many years.
I hear you, but it’s not one or the other. There are other options:
1) Build them as toll lanes, but without the 50 to 99 year contracts associated with PPPs, which include non-compete clauses thereby preventing the upgrading of any nearby roads.
2) Do as Texas did and find other money sources for highways, if there’s no political will to raise gas taxes. We were on a PPP binge thanks to Governor Perry, while pocketing billions each year in our ‘rainy day fund’ - when us slow Texans finally figured out what it meant, we demanded an end to the toll roads, so now we have rainy-day money helping to finance our highways - about 4 years into it, and it’s working great so far. The only toll roads now being built in Texas are the ones started under Perry.
You can also thank the prohibition on tolling existing interstate lanes for this fiasco. If that prohibition didn’t exist, the road could simply have had a lane or two in each direction added, with all the lanes being tolled, perhaps at a more modest rate than the almost completed “express lanes” will be.
Then again, the PPP could have been arranged so that the state would simply give an annual payment to the company over 30 or 40 years, so that the highway could have simply been widened without tolls on commuters.