P3 proponents are split on whether USDOT’s Build America Bureau’s (BAB) role in helping to standardize and promote the use of Value for Money studies to evaluate the benefits of alternative delivery of large projects.

Some see VfM as an important tool for educating the 43 state DOTs that have not run a P3 procurement.

Others see federal promotion of the highly complex studies as a train wreck for P3s. Attempts to standardize VfM at the federal level “will become another opportunity for bureaucrats to disagree,” says one developer.