Traffic projects under emergency powers to cost P1.15 T
The government will spend a minimum of P1.15 trillion in infrastructure and other projects to be fast-tracked if Congress grants President Duterte emergency powers to deal with the transportation and traffic crises.
Senate Minority Leader Ralph Recto said his calculation was based on the submission of the Department of Transportation (DOT) to the Senate committee on public services, which is hearing proposals to grant emergency powers to Duterte.
Sen. Grace Poe chairs the committee, which received the proposal from Transportation Secretary Arthur Tugade last Friday, including a draft emergency powers legislation.
The proposed emergency powers would be in effect for three years, providing legal short-cuts for the procurement and bidding processes and the creation of a single traffic authority.
The DOT’s list is clustered into four sectors: road, maritime, aviation and rail. The rail sector has a proposed budget of P1.07 trillion or 93 percent of DOT’s P1.15-trillion wish list.
Recto urged the DOT to segregate the projects into levels of priority, “from the super urgent to the slightly urgent.”
The list includes projects that can be put on the back burner, like the construction of a training room in one DOT- supervised office and the purchase of non-essential computers, he added.
Recto proposed that the DOT wish list “be clustered under one item in the 2017 national budget so that the budget cover needed to implement these will have the okay of Congress.”
“We should remember that the emergency powers being sought to address the transportation crisis can never include the power to appropriate funds,” he said.
“What it only allows is the fast procurement of projects for which funds have been appropriated.”
Not all projects will be wholly government-funded as many will be built under the publicprivate partnership program.
However, the DOT must indicate government counterpart and contingent liabilities for transparency’s sake, Recto said.
The road sector projects cost P58.6 billion, a huge chunk of which is for the P39.4-billion Metro Manila Bus Rapid Transit Line 2, a 48.6-kilometer loop around EDSA, Ayala Avenue, NAIA and the Ortigas and Bonifacio Global City business districts.