Hank Kalet

Leases take their tolls

This week’s cover story in Business Week offers a primer on the benefits and extensive pitfalls of leasing out public infrastructure — a primer that should give Gov. Jon Corzine and the state Legislature more than pause as they wade into the deep end of the pool on the issue.

In the past year, banks and private investment firms have fallen in love with public infrastructure. They’re smitten by the rich cash flows that roads, bridges, airports, parking garages, and shipping ports generate—and the monopolistic advantages that keep those cash flows as steady as a beating heart. Firms are so enamored, in fact, that they’re beginning to consider infrastructure a brand new asset class in itself.

With state and local leaders scrambling for cash to solve short-term fiscal problems, the conditions are ripe for an unprecedented burst of buying and selling. All told, some $100 billion worth of public property could change hands in the next two years, up from less than $7 billion over the past two years; a lease for the Pennsylvania Turnpike could go for more than $30 billion all by itself. “There’s a lot of value trapped in these assets,” says Mark Florian, head of North American infrastructure banking at Goldman, Sachs & Co (GS ).

There are some advantages to private control of roads, utilities, lotteries, parking garages, water systems, airports, and other properties. To pay for upkeep, private firms can raise rates at the tollbooth without fear of being penalized in the voting booth. Privateers are also freer to experiment with ideas like peak pricing, a market-based approach to relieving traffic jams. And governments are making use of the cash they’re pulling in—balancing budgets, retiring debt, investing in social programs, and on and on.

But are investors getting an even better deal? It’s a question with major policy implications as governments relinquish control of major public assets for years to come. The aggressive toll hikes embedded in deals all but guarantee pain for lower-income citizens—and enormous profits for the buyers. For example, the investors in the $3.8 billion deal for the Indiana Toll Road, struck in 2006, could break even in year 15 of the 75-year lease, on the way to reaping as much as $21 billion in profits, estimates Merrill Lynch & Co. (MER ) What’s more, some public interest groups complain that the revenue from the higher tolls inflicted on all citizens will benefit only a handful of private investors, not the commonweal (see BusinessWeek.com, 4/27/07, “A Golden Gate for Investors”).

There’s also reason to worry about the quality of service on deals that can span 100 years. The newly private toll roads are being managed well now, but owners could sell them to other parties that might not operate them as capably in the future. Already, the experience outside of toll roads has been mixed: The Atlanta city water system, for example, was so poorly managed by private owners that the government reclaimed it.

The issue is far from settled, though it seems foolish of supporters (like Philadelphia mayoral candidate Chaka Fattah this morning on WHYY radio) to crow about the benefits without acknowledging the potential problems.

The thing that strikes me about the discussion is that privatization is being pitched as a creative solution to public financing problem and that so-called liberals like Fattah and Gov. Corzine seem willing to play the game. The problems they are hoping to address — broken budgets and a lack of money for social programs — are very real, of course, but the solution is shortsighted and does not address the root causes of the problem.

In fact, privatizing only exacerbates it because the chief problem is and has been privatization and the demonization of government. We have been engaged in a decades-long downward spiral in which the word taxes and the notion of government as protector of the citizenry has been denigrated. This has led to a starvation of public resources and a group of weak-kneed elected officials at the state level unwilling to raise taxes or talk straight about service levels and who rely on borrowing to pay for what is offered.

Add to this the inability or unwillingness of Congress to fund what is needed (either directly, or through grants to states and local governments) and you have a mess.

“Asset monetarization,” to use Corzine’s term, will remain an attractive approach for governors and legislators around the country until we repair the damage done over the last three decades.

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Another steroid story

So, which big name star is going down in this investigation?

As with other drugs, if the demand is there someone will step up with a supply. Baseball need to address the demand for steroids — not just testing, but compensating players who do more than just hit homers and bringing the game back to the days when small ball was the norm and fans wanted to watch 2-1 pitching contests. If there are no benefits to be gained by taking steroids, players are likely to stop taking them.

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Is he fighting the good fight,or the partisan fight?

U.S. Attorney Chris Christie appears to be doing a good job in rooting out corruption in the Garden State. The question is whether some of his activities — his decision to take his anticorruption message to voters in Republican districts or to be seen primarily with Republican legislators — are leaving a bad taste and raise questions about his impartiaility. This is especially true with the controversy over the Bush administration’s apparent partisan power grab in the Justice Department still raging.

Christie has a partisan background and there are rumors, which he denies, that he will be challenging Gov. Corzine in 2009 — or running for some other office. I won’t go so far as to call him a partisan hack, but the math on this does not add up.

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Now he tells us

Former CIA director George Tenet is finally ready to spill the beans on the distorted intelligence that led us into Iraq.

But only because he’s expecting a big payday for doing so — not exactly the most altruistic of motives. Tenet has penned a tell-all book, “At the Center of the Storm,” that is expected to be published Monday by Harper Collins. The New York Times, which bought a prepublication copy, offered a summary of the book:

By turns accusatory, defensive, and modestly self-critical, it is the first detailed account by a member of the president’s inner circle of the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, the decision to invade Iraq and the failure to find the unconventional weapons that were a major justification for the war.

The book, the Times said, paints President George W. Bush in a positive light while also making it clear that there was little debate over going to war.

Mr. Tenet described with sarcasm watching an episode of “Meet the Press” last September in which Mr. Cheney twice referred to Mr. Tenet’s “slam dunk” remark as the basis for the decision to go to war.

“I remember watching and thinking, ‘As if you needed me to say ‘slam dunk’ to convince you to go to war with Iraq,’ ” Mr. Tenet writes.

As violence in Iraq spiraled beginning in late 2003, Mr. Tenet writes, “rather than acknowledge responsibility, the administration’s message was: Don’t blame us. George Tenet and the C.I.A. got us into this mess.”

He also

largely endorses the view of administration critics that Mr. Cheney and a handful of Pentagon officials, including Paul D. Wolfowitz and Douglas J. Feith, were focused on Iraq as a threat in late 2001 and 2002 even as Mr. Tenet and the C.I.A. concentrated mostly on Al Qaeda.

The revelations, of course, are late in coming and only reinforce what we already know. It also underscores the failure of the Republican Congress to engage in its oversight responsibilities.

David Corn in his Capital Games blog on The Nation Web site offers this take:

But here’s an out-of-the-box question: don’t the citizens of the United States deserve to know what happened in the run-up to the war (and to 9/11) for free? Tenet may feel–as he claims–damn lousy about the screwed-up National Intelligence Estimate that helped pave the way to war in Iraq. But he did not feel bad enough to resign–or to disclose earlier what had gone wrong. He sat on the story and now is peddling it for personal profit.

Tenet should have long ago been questioned openly by a congressional committee about all this–though no Republican committee chair would have dared–or he should have spilled all to 60 Minutes and other media, as a public service, not as an advertisement for his book. On Friday, Representative Henry Waxman, the chairman of the House oversight and government reform committee, sent Tenet a letter asking him to testify before his committee on May 10 regarding “one of the claims used to justify the war in Iraq–the assertion that Iraq sought to import uranium from Niger–and related issues.” Let’s hope Tenet can take time from the book tour to appear.

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Debating the debates

I missed the debate — got hom late from work and, well, it just didn’t interest me. But as my last couple of posts show, I’ve been watching some of the post-debate coverge. My sense from the handful of clips I’ve seen — and the few minutes at the end that I did manage to catch — is that I didn’t miss anything.

There are three front-running candidates, with maybe Bill Richardson hangign around the endges and two longshots with aggressively antiwar views (yes, I like Dennis Kucinich best, though I am also a realist and just don’t see him going anywhere).

So it comes down to two candidates for me: Barack Obama and John Edwards. I don’t have the sense that a debate that takes place a full 10 months before I’d have a chance to vote in the primary (it’s the only reason that I, a committed independent, remain registered as a Democrat) will help me decide.

Right now, I rank my own preferences this way:

Kucinich — against hte war, skeptical of military engagement in general, extremely liberal on other issues
Edwards — the two Americas
Obama — he speaks of hope without pandering

It gets a little more difficult from here. I think I like Richardson and Dodd next, though I can’t pinpoint why, and I don’t like Hillary Clinton or Joe Biden, though I think he is correct in his assessment that committing to a unified Iraq — a nation that was cobbled together by the British in the early part of the century when the major powers carved up the remnants of the Ottoman Empire — is almost delusional. the natural divisions are going to win out in the end, I think, though I think his suggested partition — given the mass relocations it would require can only further enflame things.

I’d rather watch Baseball Tonight and read the paper tomorrow (or tonight).

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