Details of the 6 million Feasibility Study by the Dutch firm of LievenseCSO for the new Demerara River bridge (DRB) have finally been released by the Public Infrastructure Minister (MPI), after a series of leaks that titillated and exasperated the populace over the past month. The titillation was mostly over the news that a financier of the Government’s last political campaign serendipitously owned the land on the western bank of the Demerara River where the DRB will terminate. It is not known when the land was acquired.
The exasperation was precipitated by the revelation that unlike what the pre-feasibility study, done in 2013 by a local team assembled by the previous PPP administration, had recommended – a fixed, high-level four-lane concrete structure – the proposed new structure would be a low-level, three-lane structure that would still have to be retracted to allow passage to ocean-going ships. Since one of the biggest bugbears of commuters across the present structure is that their lives are governed by its “openings and closings”, the Government gave very short shrift to this objection. The commuters are supposed to be happy they will now be able to park on the bridge rather than on the roadways. The river view would presumably still their frustrations.
Moving on to more substantive matters, we have finally been offered a tentative cost of the retracting structure – US0 million, excluding financing costs which would have to be guestimates at this time. If these are in the same ball park as presently exists, the latter would add another US million in pre-financing costs alone. We are informed that the high-level bridge would have cost another 20 per cent or US million, bringing that project to around the US0 million figure that the pre-feasibility study had suggested, for a mere million. It is our contention that in the larger picture, there should be wider consultations and discussions before the low-level retractable bridge becomes a fait accompli. After all, the fixed cost, massive governmental spending to cover the ambitious plans for clover leaf entrances and exits and some 11 km of access roads will remain the same.
The elephant in the room, of course, is the financing for the project. The feasibility study concludes that on its own, the bridge is not feasible, since at the very best, it will take a 250 per cent increase in the present toll-rates to simply take care of operational expenses. The Government will have to inject US million within the first five years to keep the venture financially afloat. It is to be noted that this just about the TOTAL cost of the Berbice River Bridge which was constructed on a Public Private Partnership (PPP) Build, Own, Operate and Transfer (BOOT) model, which precipitated a tsunami of criticism about the investors and financiers from the Government when they were in Opposition.
It is of more than passing interest that the feasibility study had also recommended the Government consider the BOOT model for the DRB, in line with what the World Bank and all other International Financial Institutions (IFI’s) have been promoting for the last few decades. The most obvious benefit of going this route, of course, is that the Government does not add to its debt portfolio which is growing alarmingly like Topsy and which will eat up an even more alarming percentage of governmental revenues.
But if it chooses the BOOT model, the Government will finally have to grapple with the realities of financing a mega-project that involves the Private Sector, and possibly understand the financial wizardry that former President Jagdeo had to perform to bring Berbice River Bridge to fruition. For instance, the private companies that agreed to purchase the common shares still have not received a single cent in dividends after 10 years, even as they are regularly castigated by the Government and its media backers for the sin of being patriotic.
It is our hope that the public look beyond the fancy computer-generated images of the proposed DRB and seriously examine the feasibility study.
