New York’s state highway system continues to rank near the bottom among all states in terms of performance and cost-effectiveness, as measured by the indicators in the Reason Foundation’s 19th Annual Highway Condition Report.

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State and local governments continue to use structured finance to obscure bad fiscal decisions. Today’s case: Louisiana’s convoluted proposed subsidy structure for the New Orleans Saints. The pending deal shows that conservative Republican Bobby Jindal isn’t shy about using state dollars for economic central planning, even at the expense of investing in basic infrastructure so that the private sector can grow on its own.  (more…)

Australia’s Macquarie, responsible for some of the biggest road-infrastructure “private-public partnerships” of the early and mid-2000s, may pull the plug on its stake in one ambitious investment, the South Bay Expressway in San Diego.

TOLLROADSnews reports that a Macquarie entity recently disclosed the following: (more…)

Eurostar is this week’s most-hated transit provider, leaving 100,000 passengers stranded in London, Paris, or somewhere in between because “fluffy snow” mucked up the high-speed trains that carry people in the undersea tunnel between Britain and France. (more…)

The state bailed out the MTA with a $1.5 billion payroll tax earlier this year. But it turns out revenues from the payroll tax will come in $200 million less than expected. If only the state and the MTA had had someone back then to tell them that the payroll tax would be a dangerously volatile source of revenue.

Oh.

Anyway. What with Albany having stolen another $146 million from the MTA recently to close its own budget gap, the authority now has a $346 million hole to fill.  (more…)

Fresh from a key court victory, Albany’s Empire State Development Corporation (ESDC), via its subsidiary, the Brooklyn Arena Local Development Corporation (BALDC), yesterday approved the issuance of up to $800 million in bonds for the construction of the Atlantic Yards basketball venue, sponsored by developer Bruce Ratner.

What is state and city taxpayers’ obligation here? (more…)

It looks more and more like Chicago’s parking-privatization deal was a bad deal for the city and a good deal for Morgan Stanley, the concessionaire. Under the 2008 deal, Morgan Stanley bought the rights to the city’s parking-meter revenue for 75 years – including the right to make massive rate hikes — in exchange for paying $1.15 billion to the city of Chicago upfront. (more…)

A few thoughts on the late-breaking Albany deal to pass the so-called Public Authorities Reform Act, now stalled for good reason in the Senate after passing in the Assembly:

Not for the first time, some of New York’s well-meaning good-government advocates are being suckered by a bill title.  Like most legislation trumpeted as “reform” in Albany, this measure’s modest virtues are being grossly exaggerated even as its negatives are being ignored, minimized or overlooked.

The bill stems from the pretense that public authorities are, as Assemblyman Richard Brodsky (D-Harrison) put it, “Soviet-style bureaucracies” that amount to a “secret, shadow government.”

In fact, because they are subject to the discipline of the bond market, the state’s major public authorities are far more transparent than the typical state agency.

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In their weekly outlook, Municipal Market Advisors (MMA) tries to dampen the hysteria over a “coming municipal market collapse,” saying that although “state and local credit quality is undeniably getting worse,” we’re unlikely to see mass-scale municipal defaults in this economic cycle.

Rather, MMA says, “pensions and OPEBs” — that is, the pension and retiree healthcare obligations that states and local governments continue to take on — “will, in the long run, divert tax revenues from infrastructure finance and service provision and thereby drag down economic growth prospects.”

Feel better?

Both papers reported this morning that “independent” arbitrator John Zuccotti, who was supposed to represent the public in the Metropolitan Transportation Authority’s contract with the Transport Workers Union, planned to donate his $116,000 fee — at $900 an hour, it can add up fast if you are, you know, working hard — to a TWU fund. The News reports that the MTA knew of this planned donation from the “outset.” The MTA and the TWU split the cost of Zuccotti’s fee.

This looks an awfully lot like the MTA paid Zuccotti an overinflated amount knowing that it would go to the TWU. (more…)