Public Private Partnership for Innovative Compensatory Mitigation Solutions

About the Program

Category: County Resiliency (Best in Category)

Year: 2016

Unique Public-Private Partnership Program Provides Innovative Compensatory Mitigation Solution for Road and Bridge Project Impacts to Wetlands and Waterways- DPW&’s Office of Engineering and Project Management is responsible for the Capital Improvement Program (CIP)—its roadway and bridge improvement projects. Often times, those projects have unavoidable environmental impacts requiring mitigation. The types of impacts related to bridge/road projects include wetland, stream, and forest habitat. CIP project schedules may be adversely impacted while mitigation options are pursued. A unique public-private partnership (P3) was forged to enable mitigation on the USDA Beltsville Agricultural Research Center (BARC) property. The “Advanced” non-tidal wetland & stream mitigation project provides a fixed price, turn-key mitigation solution that enabled three of our CIP projects to proceed into construction on time. More importantly this project secured mitigation, in advance, for an additional three CIP’s, thus creating an economy of scale. This project created a unique approach which placed financial and success-based risk and maintenance responsibilities with the private sector and federal partners rather than the county while providing significant environmental mitigation benefits.