Question on Companies that require Bonding

Interested for others perspectives on how to treat bonding in transactions. We've looked at a few infrastructure and/or construction services firms that have bonding capacity, and I'm curious if we were to go farther down the road with them how they would be viewed in the eyes of lenders (and eventually future buyers). My understanding to date is bonding capacity is treated by lenders effectively as debt which reduces the ability to add debt to the business, which is one of the reasons why there aren't a lot of these deals being done. One example -- a $5M EBITDA business with $10M of bonding capacity (even though no previous issues, just potential to reach that amount) and a 3x leverage read would only be able to get $5M of debt. 

Are others treating or thinking about this differently? We've lost on some of these auctions to groups that are paying 8x+ on these deals, and I just don't understand how these transactions make sense without being able to add any debt.