“We’re at a really interesting moment where public-private partnerships could blossom in a pretty dramatic way,” says Stephen Goldsmith, former mayor of Indianapolis and professor at Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government. “If we have technologies that are highly refined…we can anticipate a problem and fix it before it occurs.”
Goldsmith, author of 2014’s The Responsive City: Engaging Communities Through Data-Smart Governance, was the recipient of the Reason Foundation’s 2017 Savas Award for promoting public-private partnerships. (The nonprofit Reason Foundation is also the publisher of Reason.com.) As mayor of Indianapolis from 1992 to 1999, Goldsmith trimmed $100 million from the city budget mainly by requiring departments of the municipal government to compete with private companies.
“The ideas…frankly, were from Reason,” states Goldsmith. “[Director of Transportation Policy] Bob Poole spent I don’t know how many lunches in Indianapolis when I was running for mayor and after I got elected kind of going through A to Z on how to privatize.”
Goldsmith states that one impediment keeping struggling cities from embracing public-private partnerships is a basic understanding of the goal. “[It] isn’t to monetize assets,” explains Goldsmith. “The goal is efficiency.”
At the national level, Goldsmith says public-private partnerships could be key to making President Donald Trump’s one trillion dollar infrastructure investment program successful.
“Regardless of how much money it is that Washington ends up [spending]… it can’t be done effectively without public-private partnerships,” Goldsmith states. “Both for purposes of paying back the money and for purposes of maintaining the asset.”
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