Well it's finally here; the smart growth summit kicks off with an opening address by Mayor Chiarelli tomorrow morning. Then, get set for five days of town halls and speakers who, at the risk of pre-judging the summit will all say … cars are bad, smog is bad, sprawl is bad, bad is bad … but public transit is good, mixed-use and brownfields development is good, we must build up not out, blah, blah, blah.

Don't get me wrong; I'm not trivializing these ideas. Indeed, they have worked in some communities. Rather I'm making the point that given some of the pre-summit features and interviews that are being done by various media outlets, there seems to be a great deal of conformity - if not unanimity -- emanating from the assembled collection of international "experts" who will share their ideas this week. Whatever happened to the diversity of debate?

In this sense, two troubling issues have emerged. First, as I wrote last week, there is no business or financing perspective slated for the smart growth summit. We'll return to this point in a moment, as several readers indeed challenged me to offer up my ideas for financing infrastructure projects given the lack of appetite for senior governments to take a seat at our infrastructure table.

The second issue is one of a subtle but deep fault line that is sure to disappoint summit organizers and watchers. Back in January, Mayor Chiarelli and his team billed this summit as a five-day brainstorming session where solutions would be offered and debated as to how Ottawa can "manage its growth." But given the opinions expressed in advance by several of the keynote speakers, several keen observers have commented to yours truly that the summit could be turned upside down with prescriptions for Ottawa to "manage not to grow."

If this is the community vision that the majority wants to espouse, fine. But new companies wanting to locate here will become flustered and just as easily choose Raleigh-Durham, North Carolina or Richardson, Texas over Ottawa. And we must remember that the only way to redistribute community wealth is to ensure that it is created in the first place … it is not a chicken and egg type of question.

This brings back to the first issue and the points raised in last week's column. Even if the summit produces balanced and innovative infrastructure concepts (which I sincerely hope it does notwithstanding my reservations), we are still left with the financing question? Simply asking other orders of government for cash does not work anymore.

And given the legitimate demands for city and related infrastructure (water, roads, hospitals, transit, green space, pedestrian routes, etc.) that exist here and across the country, the public sector simply does not have the capacity to meet these needs. You could double all taxes tomorrow (just for the sake of argument, not something yours truly would ever recommend) and the capacity would still not exist.

In the search for money for big-ticket projects, city planners, not to mention the Mayor and council should use some their research and office budgets (which they hiked earlier this year) to scan through some of the literature produced by the Canadian Council for Public-Private Partnerships. The 3P approach has been used extensively across Canada in the last decade with no signs of letting up any time soon.

Private sector participation can be as passive as underwriting a bond issue to as active as a BOOT concept, wherein the private sector builds the asset (say a school, a library, a train system, a water plant, whatever), owns and operates it for a fixed period of time to recoup its investment, and then transfers it back to the local government for a nominal fee, hence the acronym BOOT. In return, a municipality can, by binding contract and properly structure governance model, either pay the contractor an annual subsidy for the service or allow the private company to charge fees according to a preset schedule.

Other models of funding infrastructure include joint ownership of assets for public use during certain periods of the day and commercial uses at night. Or risk and profit sharing schemes are popular, especially in the field of public transit. Equipment leasing and leaseback schemes are also popular, especially in the areas of health information technology where obsolescence of machinery is problem encountered in terms of months, not years.

From health care to water quality to landfills to land development to harbours to recreation facilities to convention centres to bridges and roads to public transit to parking meters to utilities, the variety of opportunities for private finance involvement - ready and willing to fill the void where public dollars are scarce - is infinite.

The main challenge in seizing these opportunities is not project complexity or even ideological barriers, the main challenge is in finding elected officials and senior city bureaucrats who have the courage and political will to embrace this approach. The smart growth summit will no doubt produce champions for ideas but it will all be a waste unless these champions also embrace new, non-governmental model of financing their lofty ideas.