The Tennessee Department of General Services is considering the use of public private partnerships (PPP) model to construct new public buildings.

The government's department in charge of managing existing public buildings has proven that the building maintenance is really satisfactory since it has hired the private part in the management of these buildings.

Therefore the department is considering to use PPP to build, finance and maintain new building projects with a budget of around US$100 million.

In practice, the department has issued a request for information (RFI) to identify a PPP consultant that could help the government at implementing the model in several phases:

The consultant would be in charge of:

• identifying potential P3 projects,
• advising about PPP contracting issues,
• developing a legislation to authorize the department to negotiate PPPs
• identifying legislative and regulatory possible changes in order to improve the PPP contracting process.
• educating government officials about the procurement model and help develop value for money analysis.

Legislators  are also considering draft laws to authorize local and state governments to pursue PPP for the development and operation of transportation and transit projects. According to local sources one of the first project to be implemented and looking for a private developer would be a monorail system between Murfreesboro and Nashville.

John Hull, the deputy commissioner of General Services and director of the division managing the state’s real estate assets, said:

“We’re not inventing something new here. We would be following the lead of other states that finance projects like this. A company would bring forth its financing resources so the state wouldn’t have to shoulder all of the burden. The private sector gets a committed customer over the long term. Virginia, Texas and Florida are three state that have all done this. We felt we should took a look at it as well. We’ve made no decisions whether we’ll do a public-private partnership or not. We’re looking to see if it would make sense.”

See RFI: https://www.tn.gov/generalservices/article/request-for-proposals-rfp-opportunities