Quote:
Originally Posted by Eightball
Yeah so like I said this is vapor ware right now. They've only got $115 million? Lmao. I do hope it gets built tho
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Not really...it's clear they've been laying groundwork for Federal Financing (
RRIF/
TIFIA ), which is why I've consistently found it frustrating how they could get away with gloating that the wouldn't be asking for any public 'funding.' It's technically true: it would be partially financed by the public. Though, it's probably going to bite them in the butt.
In any case, given what we know about the Administration's desires for their infrastructure bill, the overtures Abe has made about using similar financing schemes for American infrastructure (namely, HSR), and the realities of increased funding from Congress, it's pretty certain these types of loan programs are going to be what's relied upon.
The real question is what this will look like from an operations standpoint. CAHSRA is a in a bit of a different negotiating position than TXCentral, because it would appear the latter is planning to operate service itself (so far as I've been led to believe) where the former will not.
Whichever party is granted the concession for CAHSR will not be the same party with the liabilities incurred by capital construction - and if they do acquire any such liability, it will be in return for the equity from the operations of the line, itself.
In other words: CAHSRA can potentially extract a higher value from their investment - in terms of the minimum bid for the concession - since the only risk incurred by an operator is that they don't make a return from the service. This might not be true for TXCentral, since both will be on their balance sheets (e.g. probably higher fares among other things). Unless they get a favorable financing package, acquire additional property for development, etc.
I'm much more concerned with finding out just what equity the Japanese partner (JR?) has in the joint venture, as I always found the insinuation that the Japanese government would finance this to be a bit iffy considering how that went with XpressWest and their Chinese partner: many indications point to a disagreement on the rate of return they were willing to accept/forgo.
It all depends on what JR's motivation is. If it's just angling to be the supplier for rolling stock, signaling, equipment/technology, etc to position themselves favorably for future projects, then I suppose there'd be less of a conflict.