O O Ø O O O O
Steal The Road
I was leafing through my morning feeds, when I came across this item:
The Alberta government is moving ahead with the construction of the North Edmonton Ring Road from Yellowhead Trail on the west side of Edmonton to the Manning Drive Freeway using a made-in-Alberta public-private partnership (P3) model.
It was enough to set my teeth on edge—two of my most loathed pieces of political jargobabble, together in one sentence.
Made-in-Alberta
Made-in-Alberta—politically, who could argue with a phrase like that? The argument almost makes itself: Alberta can come up with a solution that is better than all those crappy solutions elsewhere. But seriously, is building a road really the kind of thing we need to eschew the rest of the world’s wisdom for, in order to champion our own, made-in-Alberta solution? Are we really going to arrive at a way to build a road that is that much better that it justifies the time spent developing the process in the first place?
I have a better idea. Let’s use a not-invented-here approach. Let’s scour the world for a few minutes and determine who is best at road projects—long-lasting, cost-efficient roads solutions with minimal traffic disruption—and do what they do. Steal the best ideas. Learn from others’ mistakes. Now those are made-in-Alberta approaches I could get behind.
Public-private partnership
Public-private partnership is even worse. Let us review for a minute, the goals of the public and private sectors, respectively.
- Private sector: make money.
- Public sector: spend money.
Thus a public-private partnership makes perfect sense—if you’re a shareholder. It’s a terrible idea if you’re a taxpayer. Before you mischaracterize me as some kind of Liberal, note that I’m not somehow knocking putting a job out to tender. I’m talking about the magical P3 wand that makes things infinitely better. Case in point:
Using the P3 process, the road will be constructed at a fixed price, finished two years earlier than through conventional delivery, and include a 30-year warranty.
Notice there is no mention of a low price—merely a fixed one. Who fixed the price? Furthermore, what kind of “conventional delivery” are they talking about here? Is there some kind of strange capitalism going on in Edmonton that makes it worth a company’s while to keep workers on the job for an extra two years? Is there a construction company in existence that’s going to be around 28 years from now to service a warranty?
Of course not. There’s no magical process required here. Just tender the damn road. It’s not made-in-Alberta, but it’s not rocket science, either.
Kjell Wooding
July 24, 2007
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