With great relief, in mid- January Los Angeles World Airports (LAWA) named the LINXS consortium led by ACS Infrastructure and Fluor Corp. as the preferred bidder for its automated people-mover (APM) P3 project at LAX airport.

Full details won’t be released until mid-March, but PWF has learned that LINXS’s design-build price, $1.949 billion, is below the owner’s estimate, relieving fears of a materially adverse impact from the recent tax law changes—the loss of debt interest deductibility balanced against benefits from a much lower corporate income tax.

“The tax changes seemed to have only a negligible impact on pricing from all appearances,” says a source.