Financing Infrastructure: Why Public-Private Partnerships Matter

After decades of underinvestment, we face an extreme infrastructure deficit in the United States. In order to bring our infrastructure into the 21st century and support a growing economy, we need to invest more in essential projects including highways, water and sewer systems, bridges, airports and more.

The problem we face is not a lack of capital – it is the ability to identify reliable funding sources to support debt service, to support return on capital and to support maintenance costs. In the coming years, there will be an increasing convergence of Public-Private Partnerships (P3) and the municipal bond market to successfully finance big infrastructure projects. A key regulatory issue is the same availability of tax-exempt financing for P3 projects as traditional municipal-bond financed initiatives. Simultaneously, we are exploring how we can make existing investment dollars go further. Innovative approaches like design-build enable us to do just that.

Now hear what Members of Congress have to say about infrastructure financing.