Clarification on Quote in Columbia Daily Tribune

This past Friday, MoDOT held a forum on future transportation funding in Missouri. It was a very worthwhile event, and the Columbia Daily-Tribune had a good article on it in their Saturday edition. I wanted to quickly clarify my quote in the article (and, by extension, alert you to it). Here is my quote:

David Stokes, a policy analyst for the Clayton-based Show Me Institute, said the state should seriously look at public-private partnerships as a way of operating new toll roads, as has been done in Illinois and Indiana.

"There’s many different ways to do it," Stokes said. "But you would have a private company get a contract under authority from the state. The state would own the road or the bridge. The private partner would build it and operate it and collect tolls to pay for it, but it would not own in any way the assets."

I think I also used Texas and Virginia as other examples, along with Illinois and Indiana. But I probably should have been more clear with the reporter that Texas and Virgina are better examples for Missouri, because they are building new toll roads via PPP from scratch, whereas Illinois (more specifically, Chicago) and Indiana took existing toll roads and turned them over to private operators. While I think those moves have been a great success for Chicago and Indiana, they don’t really apply to Missouri, as we have no toll roads to turn over to private firms. Just a small point I wanted to make.

Please don’t think I am criticising the reporter at all. Jason Rosenbaum quoted me accurately, I just should have had a different emphasis in my examples.