Hudson Crossing Partners, a loose partnership of several large firms, has been quietly lobbying state and local government for years about using public-private partnerships to build a new Tappan Zee Bridge, according to lobbying documents and interviews.
“We’ve been working for years with Macquarie Bank and Lehman Brothers and a variety of contractors to push the public-private agenda on this,” said David Sigman, a senior vice president at the real estate investment and development firm LCOR Inc. “We were hoping that now, while the environmental impact statement is still being completed, is a good time to make the policy decision on whether or not you want to do a public-private joint venture so that it could be in place by the time the environmental statement is in place.”
The group has been lobbying in the background for seven years for P3s, but until recently the efforts were informal and undertaken individually, Sigman said. In 2005, the group hired the firm Patricia Lynch Associates to talk about P3s with state and local officials and legislators who deal with transportation issues.
The group, which also includes construction giant Bechtel Infrastructure Corp., has paid a combined $229,834 in lobbying fees to PLA related to transportation and the state’s pension funds, according to public lobbying documents.
According to state lobbying reports, Lehman Brothers managing director Frank Mahoney lobbied state legislators, county executives in Westchester and Rockland counties, state deputy budget director Ron Rock, and state deputy secretary for public safety Michael Balboni about public-private partnerships for transportation projects. A Lehman spokesperson responding on Mahoney’s behalf said he declined to comment on this article.
The lobbying has focused on educating lawmakers and public officials on how P3s work and what’s been done elsewhere rather than on specific proposals, Sigman said.
“This whole thing started because we had worked on the Terminal 4 project at JFK and we thought there were parallels between the structure and financing of that deal and how you could do that for a bridge replacement, but Macquarie kind of changed the way the industry works when they bought the Chicago Skyway and Indiana Toll road,” he said.
The three-mile long Tappan Zee Bridge that spans the Hudson River connecting Rockland and Westchester counties opened in 1955 and now requires either major renovations or a replacement that could cost as much as $14.5 billion.
“It’s an intriguing idea,” said Rockland County Executive C. Scott Vanderhoef, adding that he had met with Hudson Crossing Partners several months ago. “It cannot be a completely private venture because we would want to have some kind of controls on the tolls, the money making, the maintenance.”
Ed Buroughs, deputy commissioner of planning in Westchester County said his office had met with the group in September of 2006 and with a bi-county task force in November, but that no one at the county has taken a position on whether to use P3s.
New York state Comptroller spokesman Dan Weiller said that Macquarie met with their office once in early 2006 at the comptroller’s office’s request for an informational meeting.
“We wanted to understand how public-private partnerships would work, how they would be structured, because it would be the kind of thing we would probably be called on a some point to provide analysis,” he said.
AECOM Technology Corp. is studying financing options for the bridge — including a P3 option — which are due in the spring and a final recommendation is due by the end of the year.
Sigman said that pension funds could be invested in such a concession.
“Part of what’s been changing in the industry is if you fund these things with equity or with taxable bonds then a pension fund could be an investor in a project like this,” Sigman said. “It makes sense because you’ve got a piece of infrastructure that’s designed to last for a 100 years that has in this case known traffic, it would actually be a pretty good investment for a pension fund.”
