When you think you have seen it all, here comes another and bigger bombshell of a project. For many months this column has used printing space to keep track of the biggest project in the Eastern Visayas Region ever - the Tacloban Airport Development Project.
The national government has allocated a whopping P6 billion in aggregate for this project which has an economic impact that runs to billions of pesos every year from tourist expenses.
The national government is not done yet. There are still many improvements being planned that could turn this project into the best international airport in this country, next only to the airports in Manila and Mactan.
Not A Typo Error
As mentioned here, Phase I of the Tacloban project suffered a negative slippage of 37 percent along the way, which waylaid and delayed its completion by, remember this, two years. The bad news is it is significantly delayed. However, there is a piece of good news - now the implementing agencies, the Civil Aviation Authority of the Philippines and the Department of Transportation are confident they can open the new 1,600-seat airport terminal for use by the public in early 2027 and international flights by 2028.
What is the bombshell? It is the P4.5-billion project called the Tacloban City Causeway project being implemented by the Department of Public Works and Highways. It is suffering from a negative slippage of 41 percent! That is correct – 41 percent. It is not a typo error.
This certainly requires the same call to action that the Project Monitoring Committee of the Regional Development Council passed in the case of Phase I of the Tacloban Airport Project.
The Contractor
Here, there is a contractor, Sunwest Inc., a contractor based in Bicol, that is performing poorly and could be the subject of an RDC resolution that will strongly endorse to the implementing agency, the Department of Public Works and Highways the termination of Sunwest’s two contracts, in compliance with government rules on infrastructure projects. It is implementing two portions of the project covered by two contracts, one amounting to P308 million, the other amounting to P511 million or a total of P819 million. This cost is around one-fourth of the total project cost.
Like in the airport project, the existing contractor should be disqualified from participating in the other components of this causeway project which will amount to around P3.5 billion.
And like the Phase I experience cited earlier, the contractor selected to do this project is falling way behind its contracted schedule. The completion dates of these two contracts are this month of May and then the other is July 2024.
We can easily project this to a completion in December this year or a delay of at least six months.
Tricks Of The Trade
We can see a pattern similar to that of the airport project. DPWH will issue Variation Orders to give the contractor more time to complete the project and bring the slippage to zero by mere manipulation of the scope of work including transferring some activities to the next component.
Agencies learn from each other. This ability is part of what we can call “tricks of the trade”. These tricks work like magic. The public is always amazed at how government officials can get away with it. It makes the whole exercise a circus. It is a skill that reaps dividends, though.
Let us see what happens next. As always in this column: we are waiting and watching.
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