A Tennessee transportation board selected a road-building group Wednesday to fund and build toll lanes from the southeast Nashville area to Murfreesboro as part of a package in which the contractor locked up the bid by agreeing to pay the state nearly $25 billion over the life of a 50-year contract.
The Transportation Modernization Board voted unanimously to hire a six-company partnership called DriveTN made up of Transurban, an Australian global transportation company, Tikehau Star/Infra/Capital, a French infrastructure investment firm, Ferrovial, a Spain-founded infrastructure company, its U.S. subsidiary, Cintra, a highway management company, AECOM, a global engineering infrastructure company, and Webber, an American construction company.
The group proposed to spend $9.2 billion to design, construct, operate and maintain lanes from downtown Nashville to Murfreesboro and along portions of I-40 east of downtown and I-440 south of downtown Nashville.
Transportation Department officials and Gov. Bill Lee endorsed the bid because the group said it would make nearly $25 billion in payments over half a century, in contrast to one bidder that asked for a subsidy to start the job and two other bidding groups that offered only about $7 billion in concessions.