The public debate over the merits of public agencies' use of outsourcing to acquire and maintain infrastructure often revolves around whether outsourcing saves money.
Costs are easy to grasp, the figures are usually large.
But, other more subtle factors that are key to decision makers do not lend themselves to sensationalizing by critics or proponents, and therefore often don't assume their rightful place in public debate or policy formulation. But cost alone is rarely used to determine whether design, engineering, or construction work should be outsourced. This is not an entirely new concept. In a 1984 Transportation Research Board survey of all state transportation departments, two-thirds of the respondents said they did not use or only occasionally used design cost as a factor in deciding whether to contract for design work. The respondents indicated that design cost is not a major factor when compared to other factors and that cost data for internal operations, especially overhead charges, are not sufficiently accurate to make meaningful comparisons.