THE private concessionaire for the P2.01-billion Daang Hari-South Luzon Expressway (Slex) link aims to complete the thoroughfare by February next year, a company executive said.
“It is not yet complete, but we’re making really good progress. So we expect that by February we could complete the project,” AC Infrastructure Holdings Inc. President John Eric T. Francia said, when asked for updates on the road venture.
He said his firm, the infrastructure arm of Ayala Corp., wan-ted to finish the construction of the expressway by December this year, “but with all the [bad] weather that we’re experiencing now, it’s hard to catch up.”
“We’re really able to go full blast in February this year,
because that’s when the right of way on the Slex side was cleared. The agreement with our contractor was, once they start constructing in full blast, they would deliver within a year—that’s really the standard schedule for that,” Francia added.
“December would have been a fighting target, but given the strong rains and floods that we were having, unfortunately, it’s too much of the stretch to expect that,” he stressed. Commercial operations, Francia said, would depend on how fast the Toll Regulatory Board
approves the group’s proposal.
“We would like to see that gap as little as possible. Hopefully, the gap from the opening of the expressway and the commercial operations would not be too long, we have to recover the investment, too,” Francia stressed.
The Daang Hari-Slex project was the first public-private partnership (PPP) project auctioned off and awarded under the flagship infrastructure program of
the Aquino administration. The project starts from the junction of Daang Reyna and Daang Hari in Las Piñas/Bacoor in Cavite to Slex through the Susana Heights Interchange in Muntinlupa, traversing the New Bilibid Prisons Reservation.
Under the initial design, the proposed link-road will use the Susana Heights Interchange as exit and entry from north and south of Slex and will include the construction of a new bridge/widening of the existing bridge crossing Slex, as well as the expansion of the Susana Heights toll plaza.
Ayala bagged the 30-year concession contract in 2011. The project is being implemented by the public works agency under a Build-Transfer-Operate scheme.