It's a long article, and only picking a few excerpts is hard to do. It caught my interest because Florida has considered selling off or leasing for up to 75 years such things as the Sunshine Skyway Bridge and Alligator Alley to save money for the state. In fact I believe the Florida Turnpike is partly or mostly run privately.
From Rolling Stone, which has done some great research lately while most of the media sits on their collective butts and wait for talking points to come to them from the political leaders.
Griftopia: Bubble Machines, Vampire Squids, and the Long Con That is Breaking AmericaAs it turns out, the Pennsylvania Turnpike deal almost went through, only to be killed by the state legislature, but there were others just like it that did go through, most notably the sale of all the parking meters in Chicago to a consortium that included the Abu Dhabi Investment Authority, from the United Arab Emirates.
There were others: A toll highway in Indiana. The Chicago Skyway. A stretch of highway in Florida. Parking meters in Nashville, Pittsburgh, Los Angeles, and other cities. A port in Virginia. And a whole bevy of Californian public infrastructure projects, all either already leased or set to be leased for fifty or seventy-five years or more in exchange for one-off lump sum payments of a few billion bucks at best, usually just to help patch a hole or two in a single budget year.
Still not sure what stretch of highway was sold off in Florida. I know that by 2008 or 2009 the sales of Alligator Alley and the Sunshine Bridge were halted temporarily. I do know that some toll roads in Central Florida were to be managed by foreign powers, but it is almost impossible to get the details.
Seems Mayor Daley told Obama that if we sold off our public assets we would never ever have to raise taxes.
And America is taking Daley's advice. At this writing Nashville and Pittsburgh are speeding ahead with their own parking meter deals, as is L.A. New York has considered it, and the city of Miami just announced its own plans for a leasing deal. There are now highways, airports, parking garages, toll roads — almost everything you can think of that isn't nailed down and some things that are — for sale, to bidders unknown, around the world.
This paragraph caught my eye.
When you're trying to sell a highway that was once considered one of your nation's great engineering marvels — 532 miles of hard-built road that required tons of dynamite, wood, and steel and the labor of thousands to bore seven mighty tunnels through the Allegheny Mountains — when you're offering that up to petro-despots just so you can fight off a single-year budget shortfall, just so you can keep the lights on in the state house into the next fiscal year, you've entered a new stage in your societal development.
I know that in 2007 Florida was planning to sell off
some roads and bridges. It is almost impossible to know if it happened recently, though it was stopped back then.
TAMPA - Faced with a $2.5 billion budget shortfall over the next two years, Florida leaders are considering selling 50-year leases on some state toll roads and bridges in exchange for large sums of cash from private investors.
In a preliminary study, the Florida's Department of Transportation estimated a 50-year lease on Tampa's Sunshine Skyway Bridge could be worth $1.3 billion if investors were allowed to set tolls at "market rates." The study used the example of the SunPass toll, which would double in the first, fourth and 10th years of the deal, climbing from 75 cents to $5 within a decade on the Skyway.
Florida would follow the lead of other places including Indiana, Chicago and San Francisco, which have made billions from similar deals to sell road leases to private entities. Florida's $8 billion-a-year road construction budget faces challenges such as declining gasoline tax revenue and higher materials costs.
.."Opponents worry Florida drivers could get a raw deal over the long-term because private investors would make big profits from aggressive toll hikes. And they fear privatization could hurt the poor.
......"Take Alligator Alley. For many people, that's the only way to go from east to west Florida and vice versa," said Sen. Mike Fasano, a New Port Richey Republican who is chairman of the Senate Transportation Committee. "It would be controlled by a private entity that could raise tolls ad nauseam. It could make it unaffordable for people to travel."
I don't know their status now, but
this link from the Florida Turnpike website shows that road to be at least partially privatized.
Over the past 12 years, Florida's Turnpike has made substantial improvements to the existing road system, acquired and assumed responsibility for a project completed by a local expressway authority, delivered six expansion projects, contracted most in-house functions to the private sector, promoted customer service, maintained financial stability and improved bond ratings.
Taibbi summed up the Chicago parking meter fiasco this way.
So basically Morgan Stanley found a bunch of investors, including themselves, to put up over a billion dollars in December 2008; a big chunk of those investors then bailed out to make way in February 2009 for this Deeside Investments, which was 49.9 percent owned by Abu Dhabi and 50.1 percent owned by a company called Redoma SARL, about which nothing was known except that it had an address in Luxembourg.
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