The RDC I am referring to is the Regional Development Council established under Presidential Decree No. 1 issued on September 24, 1972 by then President Ferdinand E. Marcos.
Since August, 2022 and after my election by members of this sector, I have been a Private Sector Representative in the RDC, representing Multi-Media Communications on account of my regular column in this paper and my role as Assistant Publisher.
Most of my commentaries here have dealt with issues and projects discussed in the RDC and its Committees. I did this so the members of the multi-media communications sector are informed about some important happenings at the RDC that deserve their attention and which may also be communicated to the public through radio, tv, print and digital means.
My objective here is to share with the readers observations on issues and projects discussed in the RDC. I think there is a lot of learning from these observations.
My three-year term as PSR ends on June 30, 2025. After that there will be another round of nomination and elections for the 15 private sectors represented in the RDC.
In the course of about a hundred meetings I have attended at the full council, sectoral committee and sub sectoral levels, some are clearly etched in my mind.
Number one, the Tacloban Airport Development Project. Who can forget the 35 per cent negative slippage of PHASE I involving the Construction of the new Airport Terminal Building? To confound the problem, the completion of this phase was already 2 years late as of 2023. I made some calculations based on the increased capacity of the new terminal that the region was losing a potential income in terms of expenditures of tourists in the amount of at least 5 billion pesos per year of delay.
Since it is 2 years delayed, the region has lost 10 billion pesos which translates into thousands of jobs and a significant amount of family income.
The united effort of the 15 private sector representatives by way of a Resolution, I firmly believe, was key in getting the attention of the Department Secretary and even the President so that they gave instructions to speed up implementation to ensure opening by the middle of next year, 2026, instead of 2027 or 2028. They also did not continue tapping the services of the contractor for Phase I.
The DPWH entered the picture in Phases II and III and these are well ahead of schedule enabling the project to recover some lost time and appear to be on track again.
Based on the DoTr report in the recent meeting of the quarterly Regional Project Monitoring Committee, which I always attend, the total government funds budgeted and spent for this project has reached an astounding 17 billion pesos since 2017. This easily makes the airport project the “star of all projects” in Eastern Visayas.
Related issues which have emerged during project implementation includes the high cost of land acquisition that resulted from the delay in the filing of expropriation proceedings against resisting land owners in the expansion area of the airport. I will elaborate on this in a future column. Suffice it to say at this point that the delay caused the increase in the funds needed to complete the purchases to the point that millions of pesos had to be added to the initial estimate.
The city government had ten months to complete the purchase and file appropriate judicial proceedings but was sadly unable to do it and accomplished only a fourth of the target area to be bought.
Had the City government of Tacloban acted swiftly, the cost would have been millions of pesos lower. It was a lack of urgency that cost more taxpayers money being used for the purchase. We are talking about millions of pesos here. Note that the Department of Transportation transferred, through a memorandum of agreement, national funds to the City government for the purchase of the lots. The delay is to the fault of the DoTr, but the city governments.
Another example of poor project development and execution is the Babatngon port development, also called a Transshipment Hub. Just like the airport, this is a critical (and problematic) project of the Department of Transportation.
In my view, this department “dropped the ball” in seeking the approval of the RDC of its feasibility study after funds were already allocated and the project was already awarded to a contractor for the initial phase costing one billion pesos.
Curiously, DoTr awarded it to the same contractor that botched Phase I of the Tacloban Airport New Terminal Building project, mentioned earlier.
A few months after discussing the study, the RDC received a report that the project had to be suspended for lack of an Environmental Compliance Certificate and the need for a road to bring materials from the highway to the project site.
Again, in my view, these are fundamental mistakes agencies should avoid. We have gone full circle in a negative way. In past years many studies made by the government remained unfunded for what seemed like an eternity, like this Babatngon port. But now, the opposite occurred. The billion pesos budget is allocated, but the feasibility study, the Environmental Compliance Certificate, and the needed access road are not there to justify executing the project.
Secretary Vince Hizon should look again into and act decisively on this and the Airport Project because both are very important in the economic development of Eastern Visayas.
I have more to say about my observations in the RDC in the next issues for this month.
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