Patrick Foye, Executive Director of the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey, described the signing of the Goethals Bridge DBFOM contract on April 24 as “a historic, transformative day for the Port Authority.” He followed that with a speech before 550 P3 advocates in New York City on June 19 by laying out his plans to procure four more P3 projects in the next few years.

For a bistate agency so large, bureaucratically complex and politically entwined, however, P3s are a particularly big challenge. The 40-year Goethals contract took over two years to emerge from the Port Authority’s siloed bureaucracy. A financial close is targeted for September. But “there’s a lot more work to be done on Goethals to get to financial close,” Foye says, so any celebration of the Port Authority’s first availability pay P3 is premature.