The Trump Administration is working on plans to put parts of America’s infrastructure into private hands. The idea has some merit.
Not all the details are clear yet. But states and localities could get federal incentives to sell bridges, airports, and other infrastructure. The project’s leader is National Economic Council Director Gary Cohn. He says if governments privatize existing infrastructure, that will ensure that it’s maintained — and that it’s better for local governments to fund new projects with the revenue from selling assets than for them to ask Washington for funds.
Letting profit-seeking companies run airports could improve travelers’ flying experience. The companies could earn more money by winning over more travelers — or go out of business if they can’t attract enough. And travelers do have choices, including in our area. Not only do we have Toledo Express and the Detroit airport, but Cleveland Hopkins could, if improved enough, justify the extra time in the car and win travelers away from Detroit.
Many airports in America are in great disrepair. We have little to lose from a few experiments in privatization.
Could bridges be owned by private companies that charge tolls to cover maintenance costs? That is harder to imagine, but not unprecedented.
To make sure the public gets the full benefit of privatization, there would have to be a mechanism for ensuring that competing infrastructure elements were sold to different companies, possibly even under contracts forbidding their reunification in the same private hands.
As usual, reality is more complex than a concept or a dogma. The challenge is simply stated but not so simply accomplished: to make sure the public gets the benefit of competition. Private monopolies can be even less accountable than government bureaucracies. There is no reason a company should get a monopoly just because the infrastructure it owns used to belong to the government.
We need new and better infrastructure. Partial privatization could be one tool.
First Published May 27, 2017, 4:00 a.m.
