Consider owning office buildings, Recto urges

Proposed budget for leased spaces now at R17.4 B

Senate President Pro Tempore Ralph Recto urged the government to start ditching the practice of renting offices as the proposed budget for leased spaces in 2018 shot up to R17.4 billion.

Recto on Saturday said the government should consider “rent-to-own” options for offices to avoid spending billions of pesos for rentals, which increase every year.

“There should be a plan in which chosen government offices can graduate from being renters to owners,” Recto said in a statement Saturday.

His comment was made in relation to the proposed R17.4 billion earmarked for property and equipment “rents and leases” in the R3.767-trillion 2018 national budget.

The amount, he said, is higher than the R13 billion allocated this year, and more than double the R8.4 billion spent last year.

Recto said the government has been one of the biggest property renters. The Senate, for example, has long been a tenant of the GSIS building in Pasay City.

He added that many other government offices have stayed in the same buildings, “that is if you compute the rentals they had paid, it would have been enough to finance the construction of their own building.”

The senator said that government or government-owned banks should finance the construction of such offices. He, however, admitted that there are challenges in allocating funds for the construction of government office buildings especially there are shortages in government hospital wards and police stations.

“So they will not compete for appropriations, baka pwedeng PPP (publicprivate partnership) model, or joint venture wherein government owns the land on which a building will be built by private groups, under a scheme beneficial to the government,” Recto suggested.

But, while government agencies have yet to have their own buildings, Recto called on the administration to break down lease and rental payments in the national budget for transparency and accuracy.