"The speakers just avoided discussing the scary aspect of privatization — how to keep public assets from getting gobbled up, for below fair-market prices, by Florida’s political bag men. They’re pretending not to see the unseemly potential of putting public institutions up for sale. They didn’t mention the influence peddlers who’ve co-opted so much of state and city and county government."
Posted on Sat, Jun. 25, 2011
Privatization’s unspoken risk: Corruption
By Fred Grimm
Miami Herald
The future of government runs for 10.5 miles through the heart of Broward County, amid rocks and dust and earth-moving equipment and trucks and workers along Interstate 595, where motorists can look out their car windows and contemplate another three years of traffic hell.
Don’t think of them as commuters, stewing in their gridlocked resentment, cursing the knucklehead government planners who created this transportation mess. Think of them as potential customers for Actividades de Construcción y Servicios S.A., the Spanish highway and tunnel builder. You see brutal traffic jams. ACS sees a business opportunity — 180,000 potential customers a day of whom no small percentage will happily pay for the opportunity to zoom along on a fast private highway running parallel to the unwashed (and unmoving) masses.
It’s a brilliant business plan, nearly diabolical. After four years of construction exacerbating the already torturous traffic jams on I-595, even cheapskate commuters will be exhausted and ready to pay whatever ACS demands. Call it a toll, or call it extortion.
So the company is spending $1.8 billion up front, building two reversible toll lanes down the once grassy medium, which in the old days might have been considered public right of way. The notion of public is so passé, so 2010. ACS, with the state’s blessing, will be taking the free out of freeway. It’s the new ideal in Florida, squeezing profit and (maybe, hopefully, fingers crossed) efficiency out of government functions.
On Friday, outside a Marriott Hotel on Fort Lauderdale Beach, demonstrators near the entrance indicated that not everyone’s thrilled by the private business takeovers of public institutions. They held signs demanding, “Stop the War on Workers.”
If public workers felt left out of Florida’s first privatization conference, they weren’t out of the discussion. Cities and counties and state agencies were said to be leasing out government operations like hamburger franchises to cope with escalating worker pensions and health care costs, intransigent unions and rigid civil service structures. A city official from a community that had privatized water and sewer utilities said it was worth it, now that the private contractor’s human resources director, rather than him, had to deal with the worker “who had come in drunk for the fourth time.”
Much of the talk was about raising capital for major infrastructure projects. Private corporations, it was said, can cut years off the time it would take the government to finance and build big projects. The five-year I-595 project would have taken the state 20 years to build. And there was talk of how private companies were less risk adverse than public officials, cowed by their need to mollify the baying crowd.
But not much was said about the potential corruption that dogs public-private deals, which was like describing war without mentioning that there might be casualties.
Along with the I-595 project, the conference focused on two privatization success stories — water and sewage utilities owned by the city of Live Oak and in Clay County, both now enjoying improved service and lower costs. But those nice folks from Live Oak and Green Cove Springs come from another universe. South Florida probably has more lobbyists than Live Oak, population 7,000, has public workers. South Florida has elected officials in prison or facing trial on charges that they concocted their very own special public-private partnerships. Hey Toto, this ain’t Kansas, we’re trying to privatize.
Aside from the felons mucking up the works, the mad rush to privatize prisons, utilities, freeways, computer systems and chunks of public education has become so entangled with lobbyists and campaign contributions and donors to political slush funds that it’s tough to discern the sensible deals from low-down giveaways of public assets.
Broward Commissioner Kristin Jacobs told me last week that she was worried that the privatization push was behind a state law, just signed by the governor, “that passed under the radar. Nobody in the Florida Association of Counties knew it was coming.” She said the new law weakens open-records requirements tied to the bidding process and extends “the veil of secrecy” over so-called confidential information in the winning bids. Amid this privatization frenzy, as cash-strapped governments dole out public assets to private companies, she worried that the law was concocted to obscure sweetheart deals until they become... well... done deals.
Most of what this first-ever privatization conference broached sounded like sensible solutions to the brutal economics crippling state and local government. The speakers just avoided discussing the scary aspect of privatization — how to keep public assets from getting gobbled up, for below fair-market prices, by Florida’s political bag men. They’re pretending not to see the unseemly potential of putting public institutions up for sale. They didn’t mention the influence peddlers who’ve co-opted so much of state and city and county government.
Come the second privatization conference, maybe we’ll see signs demanding, “Stop the War on Taxpayers.”