RTD plans to pay up to $5.25 million to three groups of bidders that were selected to submit potential money-saving proposals for privatizing two FasTracks corridors.

The stipends, a maximum of $1.75 million to each team, would give RTD the ownership rights to all of the ideas that each team submits, with the right to use ideas from losing bidders to sweeten the final deal with the winner.

Stipends are a typical component of the bidding process sometimes called "best value," in which the lowest priced bid isn't always the winning one.

RTD and the Colorado Department of Transportation paid a stipend of $1 million to the losing bidder in 2001 when it awarded the T-REX transit and highway job on Interstates 25 and 225 to one team - while lifting one of the losing bidder's suggestions for reconfiguring the design of the huge interchange of those two highways and saving the project $7 million.

RTD is packaging two FasTracks rail corridors - the East Corridor to Denver International Airport and the Gold Line to Arvada/Wheat Ridge - with construction of a heavy-rail maintenance yard and facility into a single project named Eagle P3.

P3 stands for Public-Private Partnership, a method in which RTD can reduce its costs by turning over to the private sector the design, construction, financing, maintenance and operation of the lines for 50 years or more.

Instead of paying upfront or through 30-year bonds, RTD can free up more money for FasTracks by reducing the projects to annual payments to the private team for its work.

It's similar to lowering one's annual costs through leasing an automobile instead of buying it, but at the end, RTD will own the rail lines.

Rick Clarke, RTD's acting FasTracks program manager, said that without a stipend, it is possible that one or more of the teams would back out of the process.

The three include some of the largest engineering, construction, transit vehicle and financing companies in the world, some of whom are working on FasTracks' West Corridor light rail or worked on the T-REX project.