Essential infrastructure that is unreliable, unsafe and costly puts the entire community at risk.  While replacing this is critical, doing so is also filled with risk.

Risk of poor design, unknown costs, non-performing vendors, misuse of funds, politics in sourcing, under-funded maintenance, new materials and technologies difficult to evaluate, early obsolescence and changing priorities.

SP eliminates all of these.

Infrastructure has experienced quantum leaps in new materials, sensors, controls, networking, and mobile software.

Old infrastructure simply doesn’t have this.  Attracting and retaining individuals interested in “quality of life” frequently don’t want the jobs.

Given the scarcity of qualified people budgets have to grow just to pay the market and cover high turn-over.

Robustly engineered infrastructure simply doesn’t unexpectedly fail.   The 24X7 remote monitoring, informs of maintenance needs long in advance so parts and service can be efficiently scheduled.

Your reasonably predictable revenues and costs like labor, utilities, leases and debt service create a well defined capital capacity.

Given a target credit rating, at times your balance sheet capacity will allow for adding debt like revenue bonds.   If the local economy is healthy or there is a visible emergency non-debt bonds like general obligation bonds can add capital.

With the new GASB and FASB accounting standards, the PPP’s, PPA’s, EPC’s, UESC’s, and concession agreements can no longer be off  balance sheet.   This adversely affects your financial ratio’s and thus credit.

Auditors and credit agencies are now pushing for beyond end of useful life infrastructure (deferred maintenance) to be estimated and added as a liability, again adversely affecting credit.

Investments by utilities where the obligations is a monthly use, capacity or availability payment has no affect on your balance sheet.   So SP can invest in any amount.  This eliminates your deferred maintenance, increases the market value of your facilities and thus improves your balance sheet thus capital capacity.

Infrastructure projects are rarely a political priority due to their inability to be completed during their term.

Competitors for re-election then can point to such projects as failures.   Few understand the process requirements which results in years passing vs. months.  Thus, when budgets are debated, only inadequate infrastructure maintenance is accomplished.

SP is different.   We can use best-practices that are highly efficient.  We are also continuous buyers with already negotiated risk assessed vendor terms and conditions.   When SP uses its own funds, fast financial decisions on deposits, change orders, hold backs, progress payments, insurance claims, vendor missteps can be accomplished.

The Time-Line we show is due to our being fully aligned with your priorities as a utility service vs the traditional purchase or public works procurement.

SP optimizes for the lowest monthly use fee, not project cost.   With no capital constraints, agnostic to vendors, contractors, politics, capital providers, we source on comprehensive economic & risk analsysis that is merit based.   Quality providers are excited by this and are aggressive to win the business.

A 5%-40% lower procurement cost results which is enhanced by: cash incentives, limited intermediators, national contracts, vendor driven engineering and extended warranties.

While labor, management, engineering, site prep is the same, having equipment that is twice the cost results in only a 25% increase to the project cost but will last twice as long problem free with very low on-going maintenance costs.   Thus our use fee for the most expensive infrastructure is lower than the value-engineered (RFQ/RFP) infrastructure.

Where SP owns the infrastructure, by contract you can terminate at any time and take over the assets.

Taxpayers are fully protected by SP having no termination fees or penalties.   The cost of assets is driven by the real world remaining useful life vs. some arbitrary accounting time-line.

A 3rd party, approved by you, determines useful life and our fully transparant accounting has all actual costs to prorate against.

This protect against accounting having only depreciated 50% while there is almost no remain useful life.  This would result in you paying money out without receiving value back which goes against SP’s ethics.

Customers wanting to fund themselves for any combination or portion of the infrastructure will find it easy with SP.   Since SP adds no margin to its capital sources, SP is agnostic and can be a true partner in helping figure out best funding sources whether on balance sheet or off.

Due to community growth and inability to redevelop essential infrastructure, such is normally old, fragile and at maximum capacity.

As a general risk mitigation for all parties, SP always over engineers new infrastructure with the result being a highly resiliant system.

We also use modular design principles to remove single points of failure.   Since our customers are month-to-month, it is critical for the systems to be reliable, safe and efficient.   Termination from a utility like SP is fast and easy, thus we are 100% aligned by design with all resiliancy initiatives.