Alberto Gonzalez runs business development for Cintra, the infrastructure development arm of Ferrovial. His read on the American highway market is blunt: the needs keep growing, the money doesn’t, and the arithmetic isn’t close.
“The gap between the needs and the funds available continues to increase,” Gonzalez told Construction Dive. Population growth, inflation on construction inputs, and a tighter fiscal posture at the state level are all pulling the same direction. “The pressures are greater than the relievers.”
Why the funding gap keeps widening
Public money hasn’t disappeared. It just can’t keep pace. Federal formula funds and state gas tax revenue were sized for a maintenance program, not a rebuild, and construction cost inflation has quietly eaten a meaningful share of every IIJA dollar since 2021.
Gonzalez is careful not to oversell his own product. “P3s are not available or not suitable for every project,” he said, “but it’s certainly a tool that has to be in the toolbox to try to augment the reach of the public funds.”
The day-one funding argument
The strongest case he makes is about schedule, not capital. Under a concession, the developer has every dollar committed at financial close. Then it’s a question of how fast crews can run.
Traditional delivery doesn’t work that way. Public projects get funded through an annual budget process, which means the pace of construction is governed by how much money a legislature allocates in a given year to a given region. That is why so many state DOT projects stretch a five-year schedule into nine. Gonzalez argues that projects with hard deadlines or high accountability demands are therefore the natural P3 candidates, along with toll roads where pricing complexity itself rewards private operating expertise.
The part that doesn’t get said out loud
What a demand-risk P3 really does is transfer traffic risk to people willing to price it. That is genuinely useful, and it is also how you end up with 50-year concessions that a future governor has to explain. Georgia just signed one on SR 400, where an $11 billion package — the largest TIFIA loan ever issued — put FlatironDragados and Acciona to work on 16 miles of express lanes. Louisiana did the same on the I-10 Calcasieu River Bridge.
Both projects open in 2031. The verdict on whether the model works arrives about five years after everyone has stopped paying attention.