The Tribune

By NATARIO McKENZIE

Tribune Business Reporter

nmckenzie@tribunemedia.net

Bahamian companies should seek foreign joint venture partnerships to present a more “complete package” to Government when bidding on contracts, a leading Bahamian engineer said yesterday, suggesting this was an area where many were ‘falling down’.

DeCosta Bethel, the Bahamas Society of Engineers (BSE) president, addressing a press conference to highlight the upcoming Engineer’s Conference, said more joint ventures needed to be encouraged.

“I think where a lot of Bahamian companies fall down is they fail to form these joint ventures to present a more complete package to government to address that project that is out there,” Mr Bethel said.

“We have a lot of small and medium-sized companies that, for some reason, don’t get together. We need to encourage more of that. The Government also needs to encourage these international companies so that when they come here, as best can be afforded, they work through these local companies.”

The Engineers Conference, to be held at the Melia Nassau Beach resort this Friday, will focus on private-public sector partnerships (PPPs) under the the theme, ‘The role of Public-Private Partnerships (PPP) in the Effective Delivery of Infrastructure Projects’.

“We believe this to be important because it’s a nationally significant topic at this time. Globally, governments are embracing public private partnerships as a vehicle to deliver more and improved services to their citizens,” said Mr Bethel.

“This is happening against the backdrop of managing national debt and balancing operating budgets, which to a large extent are the drivers of governments entering into these partnerships at an increasing rate.

“Over the past decades there have been thousands of these arrangements, yet in the Bahamas the terminology is relatively new.

“Recently, the Government issued a request for expressions of interest into the private forum with a list of projects that it intends to implement in the near-term. These projects add up to over $175 million. It presents an opportunity for Bahamian companies to form these joint ventures or special purpose vehicles to provide proposals to the Government to take advantage of these opportunities.”

David Pratt, international affairs officer (Latin America and the Caribbean) for the Canadian Society for Civil Engineering, said that since 2008 over $60 billion worth of PPPs have been implemented in his country.

“This includes infrastructure such as hospitals; schools; highways and bridges; energy, including transmission lines and, lately, transit has become a major focus in the PPP sector,” Mr Pratt said.

“The structure of these public-private partnerships in Canada is usually a 30-year concession, which would involve the design, build-out financing and maintenance of these infrastructure. After 30 years there is a hand-back to government of the assets in good condition.

Mr Pratt added that one of the reasons why Canada had gone the PPP route is because it provides value for money.

“Our experience has been that large infrastructure projects typically are late in delivery and over budget. The bigger the project, the later they are and the more over budget they go,” he explained.

“To stem that tide we have adopted this new approach, and a big part of that is risk transfer from the public to the private sector, in particular in the design and construction schedule. In the past the government would take those risks; now we have passed that on to the private sector.

“As a result, our on time and on budget success rate on large billion dollar projects is about 98 per cent. We had an audit last year and it showed that 98 per cent of our projects are on time and on budget. Our goal is to transfer this knowledge to the Bahamas.”