When Nikita Floyd was 11 years old, his father took him to a job site in a low-income area of Washington D.C. and put him to work picking up trash and mowing lawns. At the time, Floyd says he didn't want to do that kind of work for a living because, "I didn't get paid for it, it was a chore."
But when he grew up, Floyd recognized an opportunity. He launched his own landscaping firm, Green Forever, and was eventually awarded "Business of the Year" in 2014 by the Prince George's County Chamber of Commerce.
One of Green Forever's signature services is something Floyd's father likely never would have dreamed of. Floyd specializes in maintaining green infrastructure—the constructed wetlands, porous concrete, and bioswales increasingly being built across the nation to help manage stormwater.
Floyd came to the work through a "Mentor/Protege" program developed by Prince George's County, Maryland as part of its commitment to assisting local and minority-owned businesses. The program was part of an effort to comply with a federal mandate to reduce polluted stormwater runoff draining to the Chesapeake Bay.
Prince George's county didn't just want to comply with a federal mandate. Instead, county leaders sought a more holistic solution to the problem. The county wanted not only to reduce its polluted stormwater, but also to help the community along the way.
The 'high road': A community benefits public-private partnership.
According to the American Society of Civil Engineers, the total investment gap for water and wastewater infrastructure in the United States is expected to be $105 billion by 2025. Increasingly, public agencies are looking to the private sector as a new way to help pay for underfunded public services and infrastructure.
Sanjiv Sinha, Ph.D., is a vice-president with Ann Arbor-based consulting firm Environmental Consulting & Technology, Inc. (ECT). With funding from the Great Lakes Protection Fund, Sinha is pioneering the application of market-based business concepts to stormwater work. He is leading market sizing studies and development of business plans for the use of these new concepts in the Great Lakes basin. His work is profiled at
P3GreatLakes, a resource dedicated to assessing and, where appropriate, promoting the use of public-private partnerships (P3s) in the Great Lakes basin.
"Traditionally, looking at the private sector has meant working with private investment to pay up-front costs for projects, allowing public agencies to build more quickly than slow public bonds would allow, and hopefully leveraging private sector efficiencies to lower cost," Sinha says. "But new P3 models go beyond this to combine private finance with project delivery, management, and maintenance, even linking outcomes to project performance and social goals."
Prince George's County entered into a novel kind of partnership agreement with a Rhode Island-based Corvias Solutions, a consulting firm specializing in public-private partnerships for building and managing public infrastructure projects.
The Clean Water Partnership is a Community-Based Public-Private Partnership (CBP3) between the county and Corvias Solutions. Through the 30-year agreement, Corvias executes and performs the finance, design, construction, operation, and maintenance of the Prince George's County's stormwater management programs. This means an entirely new approach to building new infrastructure—one that looks beyond water to solving additional challenges identified in the community.
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"We sign on to achieve the goals built from a delivery standpoint, but also broader policy objectives, and we assume the risk," says Greg Cannito, a managing director with Corvias. "For example, in our performance-based system, it's not just about delivering work on time and under budget. We also have socio-economic workforce development hiring goals."
Prince George's County was under a court order to meet EPA Clean Water regulatory requirements, which requires it to treat 15,000 acres of polluted runoff by 2025. As part of this goal, CWP has been tasked with treating up to 2,000 acres of these impervious surfaces by constructing green infrastructure on both public and private land. Prince George's County set additional requirements to utilize certified local, small, minority and women-owned businesses for 30 to 40 percent of the total project scope.
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Greg Cannito, managing director, Corvias
"High-road infrastructure is where you're utilizing infrastructure as a platform in order to achieve greater services and greater outcomes for the community," says Cannito. "We help develop and design the program, assume long-term management as the private partner with the public entity, and if they want to finance it, we can do the financing as well. Then we procure for the local market, develop programs with the schools with the local subcontractor base, and make sure the work gets done in the way that the public partner is hoping. Finally, we measure that based on the already predefined outcomes they hope to achieve."
The project has exceeded these goals under budget and on-time, according to Cannito.
"We've saved by cutting the costs to achieve about 50 percent savings, and we’ve utilized 80 percent local, small, disadvantaged, county-based contractors," says Cannito.
Designing the marketplace to gain private sector efficiencies
How was the Clean Water Partnership able to deliver such outstanding results? According to Cannito, it's all about leveraging the efficiencies of the private sector.
"Stormwater is a highly piecemealed, fragmented type of work that municipal governments or governments do in the traditional design/bid/build mode," says Cannito. "We were able to aggregate the work and put it into more of a large-scale design/build/operate/maintain kind of manufacturing line. We were able to scale it. That gained us a lot of efficiency and economy of scale."
Part of that process, says Cannito, was about taking the time to design the marketplace and create what he terms a "demand-based pipeline" of qualified labor to get the job done.
"Instead of just running out and designing the project and building it, we assess the subcontractor capacity of the marketplace. It's a little bit of a 'go slow to go fast' approach, but what you'll find is that the marketplace has the capacity. Nobody really takes the time to connect the dots."
According to Cannito, many design-build projects undertaken in the public sector are missing opportunities to work with the private sector to leverage private competition and innovation.
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"The public sector doesn't ask enough of the private sector," he says. "Typically in a lot of cases, they'll do an RFP for a project, and they'll prescribe so much that the private sector just bids on what they prescribe knowing that they’ll change-order it later. Even if what they prescribe they know is not feasible, they know as long as they can check the box on that RFP, they can get selected and they can change order. This approach is really where instead of prescribing a scope to the private sector, it's asking the private sector to provide proposals based on the outcomes that they want to be achieved."
New approaches to green infrastructure financing
Financing is another key area where public-private partnerships can change the paradigm for how public infrastructure projects are executed. According to Cannito, financing should follow project design to allow the public agency to identify clear goals.
"Too many people are so focused on going to get financing, they forget about structuring a really good project," he says. "The public sector should really be focused on their goals and achieving those outcomes, and allow the private sector to propose innovative solutions. The better you can structure a project's goals, the public sector can have their pick of any type of financing that they want which can be approached at a later stage."
That may include a mix of public and private financing. Cannito says that private financing is not necessarily more expensive than public financing if you consider overall costs of execution, and has the advantage of being able to fund a project up-front, which means water quality benefits can be realized right away as opposed to a decade down the road.
"Investors are attracted to project execution and surety," says Cannito. "Having a program that is goal-oriented based on a broader vision is in line with the newer metrics of investors. And a project where you are getting the private sector to guarantee the surety of execution? Now you've taken the risk out of the project … and that makes it much more financeable for investors."
One novel and promising approach to structuring financing is called an "Environmental Impact Bond" whereby a private financial institution provides financing upfront and then the payer, the government entity who benefits from that solution, pays back the financing based on predefined performance. This type of financing shifts the risk away from the public agency and onto the private investors.
Todd Appel is a vice-president with Washington D.C.-based investment firm Quantified Ventures, pioneering a "pay-for-success" financing model that links investment performance outcomes.
Appel recently worked with the D.C. Water and Sewer Authority to pilot a project to finance 20 acres of green infrastructure as part of the District's consent decree to reduce its combined sewer overflows under the Clean Water Act. The District was on the hook to build $2.5 billion in tunnels to reduce CSO volume but got an amendment to substitute 350 acres of green infrastructure to handle some of that reduction.
"So they were embarking on that and they were worried about the performance risk of the green infrastructure, would it actually reduce the volume of stormwater flowing into the sewer system under the consent decree?" says Appel. "So they decided to do two things. One, start with a pilot. They'll build green infrastructure on 20 acres initially. And secondly, finance that pilot with performance-based financing. So they issued a municipal bond of $25 million dollars for the design, build, and maintenance of the green infrastructure on the 20 acres. And unlike a normal municipal bond, this one is tied specifically to the success of the green infrastructure in reducing the volume of stormwater."
The investment is modeled based on expected outcomes and assigned probability ranges to create three payment tiers. The middle one is "as expected" or the most likely outcome that covers a wide range of probable outcomes. For this range, D.C. Water pays out their normal cost of capital. But if it's "below expected" then the investors get close to zero percent interest.
"Effectively the investors are providing an insurance policy to D.C. Water if the green infrastructure totally fails," says Appel. "And if the performance is 'better than expected' the investors get premium. So this environmental impact bond is a way of passing on some of the risks of a green infrastructure deployment to investors."
To determine payouts, baseline data on performance is being collected in the field and follow-up data will be collected over four years. In year five, investors will know what tier the investment ended up based on performance, and will "square up" based on that. This was the first environmental impact bond issued in the country and the first instance of a municipal bond having an outcome-based payment according to Appel.
Quantified Ventures is now looking to replicate the program through a program funded by the Rockefeller Foundation to identify two U.S. cities in which to test this model of financing for green infrastructure. The firm is also working with the Chesapeake Bay Foundation to select four communities in the Chesapeake Bay Watershed to finance their green infrastructure programs with environmental impact bonds. Clearly, while the concepts are new, many thought leaders are rapidly beginning to explore it.
Can this work in the Great Lakes?
So far, public-private partnerships have not been a part of stormwater management in the Great Lakes region, which still relies mainly on public funding to create and implement green infrastructure.
Sinha's Great Lakes focused team includes both Corvias and Quantified Ventures, as well as other companies that bring in cutting-edge, national expertise to the basin.
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Sanjiv Sinha, Ph.D., vice president, Environmental Consulting & Technology, Inc.
"One key challenge to the use of these new concepts to water infrastructure is that there is a significant knowledge gap," Sinha says. "So far no one is advising communities or agencies by clearly articulating why they should even consider this approach."
Sinha's team has analyzed several P3 frameworks for Milwaukee Metropolitan Sewerage District (MMSD) and Northeast Ohio Regional Sewer District that collectively serve dozens of Great Lakes communities, and has developed prototype business plans for implementation.
"We believe these frameworks are equally relevant in other regions across the Great Lakes and beyond," says Sinha. "We do know the Great Lakes market has the appetite for large-scale green infrastructure. A report we recently published shows that five Great Lakes states can support well over a billion dollars of investment in green infrastructure."
Sinha's work with the MMSD shows that there are significant values to be gained by the use of a CBP3.
The MMSD is a regional wastewater utility with a 411 square-mile service area serving 1.1 million people. The MMSD has built a deep tunnel system and has been able to reduce its combined sewer overflows to a point where they only occur once or twice a year now, meeting its obligations under the Clean Water Act.
Despite this achievement, MMSD is looking to implement green infrastructure within its service area as part of its 2035 Vision, which calls for a goal of 740 million gallons of treatment via green infrastructure to be built.
"We're looking for green infrastructure to add a layer of additional capacity and resiliency where water falls," says Kevin Shafer, executive director of the MMSD. "The benefit of green infrastructure is that it's not only for stormwater quantity and quality, but that it also produces a whole host of benefits that gray infrastructure can't. So, whether it's increased property values, better quality of life, aesthetics, what have you, there are so many other things that green infrastructure brings to the table."
And Shafer is looking with keen interest at what has been happening in Prince George's County, Washington D.C. and elsewhere.
"We see green infrastructure, both the infrastructure and the maintenance of it, as a possibility of employing a variety of folks, to be able to give them a living wage to move forward, and as a way to revitalize and improve the quality of life in some of the lower-income areas," says Shafer. "And we're finding that gallon for gallon, green is at least cost-competitive with gray infrastructure."
Shafer is looking into multiple ways of financing and implementing its green infrastructure goal. According to a report by ECT, MMSD stands to save $500 million in costs over 30 years by taking a CBP3 approach. But for Shafer, while compelling in looking out for ratepayers' interests, the appeal goes beyond dollars and cents.
As chairman of the board at the U.S. Water Alliance Shafer is at the vanguard of a movement to integrate water quality into the entire quality of life of an area.
"It really is looking at this 'one water' approach, trying to not just improve water quality, but to improve neighborhoods, the livability of cities, increase economic development, and benefit the quality of life of the entire area," says Shafer. "That brings with it a lot of efficiencies that can also help meet some of these other social goals that we’re looking for as well."
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This Partner Content was produced by Issue Media Group for the P3GreatLakes Initiative. Find out more about green stormwater infrastructure and how public-private partnerships can work at www.p3greatlakes.org