介绍:
So right after we adopted the guidelines, the projects started rolling in at the local government level. There’s a state law, as well. Since the last ten years or so, in Virginia there have been somewhere between 150 and 200 what I would call fairly significant infrastructure projects. And again everything from water, wastewater, to schools, to you name it. I’ll mention a few of those.
When I mentioned that the Virginia laws have been somewhat foundational, you can see that, in whole or in part, the Virginia law has been adopted by a number of these other states. All told, there are about 39 states across the country that have some form of a law. Some are more robust and broad, than others. The Utah one, for example, for many years and I don’t know about it now, was really confined to just IT. But not transportation and not other things, but whether that’s still the case or not I don’t know. But some were more robust than others.
Currently, me and my firm, we are working to try to get passed in those states that you see there - Arkansas, Kansas, Missouri, New Mexico -- and New Mexico just sort of went down in flames, I believe a week or two ago. There were some public employee unions who had some concerns. Others will talk about the Maryland law. We were very active in getting it passed in Texas and Governor Perry signed it a few years ago. Just last week, or a couple of weeks ago, March 2015, just a few weeks ago, it was passed in Georgia. We’d been active in Georgia trying to get it passed for quite some time.
The Georgia law, like the Virginia law, and if you look at the Georgia and Virginia laws, they’re almost word-for-word. The Virginia law, and the same was true for it in Texas, the Virginia law was very much *115 part of the Georgia law. Both of them start the act, with legislative findings. At least in the Virginia Code, it is a little bit unusual to have legislative findings as a preamble for a significant statute. The fact that the legislature in Virginia and Georgia did it tends to speak to the importance the legislature is trying to impart to the reader of the law of this act.
That the legislature went so far as to create findings as to why this is in the public interest. The Georgia statute, I just list a few of the findings because that will serve as part of the history of this and on the foundation of the law. The Georgia legislation had five sort of key legislative findings. First, keying off of what Scott was saying, there is a public need for timely acquisition design construction rehab, equipping, etc. of public infrastructure and government facilities, so there is a public need. Second, current procurement methods may not meet that need. Third, public resources are inadequate to meet the public need for infrastructure in government facilities improvements, precisely what Scott was saying. Fourth, financial incentives exist to entice public private partnerships. And fifth, last, private entities may be a part of the solution to timely meeting this public need.
So that was the statement of the Georgia legislature, similar one of the Virginia legislature, to put out there why this following act of the code is important. The Georgia law, you can see, that’s sort of the way its laid out, and Virginia law is very much like that as well in terms of the elements of the act.
In Virginia we really have three procurement statutes. One is the traditional RFP design-bid-build. It’s the very traditional, very structured, not very flexible price rules kind of act. We all know it, that’s it there and really the bottom line is construct to the plans. That’s what you do. Price, price rules in this particular procurement.
Second, we also have the design build law, which is when the contractor and the architect and or engineer get together, take a team approach to designing, constructing, financing a project. Design build is often good for kind of your bigger more complex projects.
Then the third, and this is what we’ll talk about, the Virginia law. Our law is good for both local and state projects. Mr. Jefferson’s capital building, four-five no, six or eight years ago underwent a little over $100 million renovation. It was a public private partnership. It was procured under the state’s statute.
They can be solicited or unsolicited. In Virginia the vast majority are unsolicited. Unsolicited does not mean unexpected. The proposer will have gone to the county local government and say I have an idea. They will walk through it. Are you interested? The local government will likely say yes. Lets talk more. You will enter into weeks or months worth of discussion before the developer takes it upon himself to do something very capital intensive, labor intensive, completely at risk, and to present, prepare his proposal.
*116 When all said and done, the law in Virginia is kind of de-facto design build. It’s kind of glorified design build. Equally it’s nice to know what it’s not. It’s not a financing tool. It doesn’t create any new financing mechanisms. It relies on the existing mechanisms that are available in Virginia law. For the social infrastructure projects, it’s the general obligation debt, its some tax financing, land swaps, all of those kinds of things, that really you can’t do, or can’t do easily under a traditional RFP low-bid-build kind of procurement statutes. But you can do things like this, much more flexible.
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