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