By Tim Mollison

Consultants and staff working for the Region of Waterloo now recommend that our community’s first light rail transit line be designed, built, financed, operated and maintained by a private-sector partner for up to 30 years while the region pays for the project in installments.

Tossing the entire project to the private sector without careful consideration for service delivery would be a mistake.

For better or for worse, people are familiar with the term P3 or PPP, which stands for public-private partnership. These are usually projects that involve some sort of permanent private-sector investment, which usually means that the private company ends up owning a piece of the project or controlling its operation for a period of time.

Some P3 projects we may be familiar with include the Confederation Bridge between New Brunswick and Prince Edward Island, where a private company has a 35-year concession to operate the bridge and keep the toll money, and Ontario Highway 407, where a private company can pretty much charge whatever they want for 99 years, and the provincial government isn’t allowed to build any highway that competes with the 407.

We also have several recently-built P3 hospitals where the doctors and nurses remain public employees, and the new courthouse in downtown Kitchener, which will be built using a similar type of partnership — the judges and prosecution will be public employees, the cleaning staff perhaps not.

The type of partnership that regional staff and consultants recommend would allow the region to retain ownership over the bricks and mortar of our LRT, but the report argues that having the builder also run the system ensures that we get LRT that doesn’t fall apart.

This is a lofty goal, but we need to be aware of what we are and are not getting under such an arrangement:

• We are not getting staff who will have the experience to design or build a system extension to Cambridge, nor will they have the expertise to design system expansion along Victoria Street, University Avenue or Coronation Boulevard. When the buses on these corridors become overwhelmed and need replacing with LRT, we will need to either find another private partner or hire staff with this expertise later.

• We are getting a private partner who will need to be kept on a short leash. Regional staff and consultants seem open to shorter operations contracts in the five-to-10 year range, to keep the private-sector partner always competing for our business.

• We are getting the experience of a private-sector company who has built LRT before, and all of the staff they employ. We are also getting higher interest costs, however, because our community has access to better interest rates than any company in the private sector, and money for this project will need to be borrowed over a 20 to 30 year term. It remains to be seen whether the cost-cutting experience of the private sector staff will outweigh the fact that the private-sector mortgage rate will be higher.

• Finally, and most importantly, for the next 30 years, we will be getting whatever deal the region’s lawyers think to draw up in the next two. It will be crucial that the region sets up a deal where we get a high quality of service for our tax money, even 27 years after opening day.

That is difficult. York Region has just provided a shining example of how not to contract out your transit service, where the private-sector operator had bid too low: York bus drivers were upset that drivers in neighbouring Toronto made almost twice as much per hour working for the TTC.

York’s three-month strike is coming to an end as the Post goes to press this week — the damage this strike has done to transit ridership could take years to reverse.

One should hope the same will be less likely here, with so much riding on our LRT.

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Guest columnist Tim Mollison is a founding member of the Tri-Cities Transport Action Group (TriTAG).