Chicago infrastructure bank

He says the CIT is trying to learn lessons from places like Australia, British Columbia, the United Kingdom and Virginia about how best to run organizations specifically tasked with arranging P3s. The Works is made possible with the support of the Surdna Foundation. Smith is a reporter based in New York.

He has written about transportation, infrastructure and real estate for a variety of publications including New York Yimby, where he is currently an editor, Next City, City Lab and the New York Observer. Tags: infrastructure , public transportation , chicago , the works , rahm emanuel , bill clinton. Sign Up. Donate Today. Sign-up for our newsletters Sign Up. Please enable JavaScript to view the comments powered by Disqus. Job Board View all jobs. Get our best reporting, job of the day, and smartest reader.

Sign up for our newsletter. Mayor Rahm Emanuel this week could see his proposed Chicago Infrastructure Trust approved by the City Council which would provide as much as seven billion dollars in funding for city projects.

The Mayor has been ambitious in tackling the needs of the city to upgrade roads, bridges, tunnels and rail lines which are needed to not only attract businesses and private individuals to live and work in the city, but also to restore Chicago to a place among the top cities in the world for commerce.

Of interest to companies doing business internationally are pages 21 through 23 which highlight several key assets that Chicago has as a world-class transportation hub, including:. Chicago ranks third among U. The broader political context should sound familiar, too:.

Still, the Britain that Tony Blair inherited had the Thatcher imprint all over it. It was an axiom of New Labour not to shake the foundations she had laid. Part of this was calculation. Like all successful electoral machines, New Labour was a construct, a coalition of different forces.

Some of this was also a conversion to a value system. Indeed, Blair's programme for the election confirmed all Mrs Thatcher's free-market reforms of a deregulated, non-planned, largely privatised economy with a flexible labour market, marginalising the trade unions and local authorities, while publicly disowning Left-wing shibboleths such as redistribution.

Initial experiments with privatized road building were reportedly quite popular, coming in on time and under budget. As PPPs have supplanted public investment and operation on a scale barely comprehensible here, however, they've come under fire :. PPPs, however, have time and again proven not to work. The past record of London's tubes, the Channel tunnel, city academies and other schemes has conclusively demonstrated that the private partner is never willing to bear any downside risk.

The reason is simple: a government would never let a public service fail, and so all PPPs suffer from severe cases of moral hazard. The UK has favored the DBFO model design, build, finance, operate , essentially the approach the Daley administration took to the parking meters, which proved politically disastrous and is increasingly so across the pond.

By contrast, the CIT, as initially presented, is modest. According to Hal Dardick's report in the Tribune , potential investors are interested in a more narrow role, and the administration in a more narrow model still:. Some potential trust investors have told the Tribune they may be interested in lease-to-own deals, under which they pay for new assets and the city leases them for years before taking possession. But Emanuel spokesman Tom Alexander said the proposal "is not about privatization or lease buy-backs or anything like that.