Construction Dive
When Denver International Airport (DIA) officials terminated the $1.8 billion public-private partnership (P3) terminal expansion deal with Great Hall Partners last year, industry watchers wondered if they would be able to get the project back on track and finish it close to its projected completion date. At the very least, the turn certainly knocked some of the polish off the notion that P3s were the answer for every public project.
Since then, DIA has revamped its delivery strategy and decided a P3 was not the right approach. Now an even higher-profile, costlier partnership could be on its way to taking a similar hit — the $2 billion, 16-mile Purple Line light-rail project in Washington D.C.’s Maryland suburbs. The Purple Line has attracted national attention because it is being financed and built via a $5.6 billion public-private partnership, one of the most far-reaching of any U.S. transit project, according to The Washington Post.
But in this new scenario, the public agency — in this case, the Maryland DOT and the Maryland Transit Administration — is not scuttling the P3. In an announcement earlier this month, the design-build arm of the P3, Purple Line Transit Constructors (PLTC) said it would exit the project.
PLTC is a design-build joint venture between Fluor, The Lane Construction Corp. and Traylor Bros. Inc. Fluor is also a member of the development and equity investment team called Purple Line Transit Partners, which includes Meridiam and Star America.
In the press release announcing the decision, PLTC sad that it has not been able to successfully negotiate time extensions for schedule delays and for the extra costs it has incurred during the last three years on the project.
“But,” Kastan said, “teams may also be ‘older and wiser’ and willing to engage in other similar projects but with particular demands as to deal terms that they have learned the hard way.”
Read full article – What does Maryland’s Purple Line project team breakup mean for P3s?
