PRESIDENT Aquino is being urged by the Philippine Business Conference (PBC) to “focus on the infrastructure deliverables during the remainder of his term of less than two years.” That quote came from PBC Chairman George T. Barcelon. He said the President should, henceforth, avoid being sidetracked by politics and the 2016 presidential elections.
Among the big-ticket projects in the public-private partnership (PPP) pipeline that has been left on the back burner since it was first proposed is the North Luzon Expressway-South Luzon Expressway Connector Road Project.
The proponent of this project is the Metro Pacific Tollways Development Corp. (MPTDC). In 2010 it submitted an unsolicited proposal to the newly installed Aquino administration, specifying the details of what looks like a brilliant infrastructure idea.
In that proposal, MPTDC volunteered to connect both expressways through an elevated highway above the Philippine National Railways railroad line, so there would be no right-of-way problems to contend with and allow its untrammeled construction. To me, this is the brilliant aspect of that proposal.
(For a broader view of what Metro Manila needs to end its “infrastructure woes,” a study conducted by the Japan International Cooperation Agency estimates that Metro Manila needs to construct at least 137 kilometers of new roads, another 78 km of urban expressways and more than 200 km of new rail transit lines, both elevated and underground.)
The length of the elevated connector road that MPTDC is proposing to build may be only 13 km, but, once constructed, it would significantly ease the daily gridlock in Metro Manila by offering an alternative route to vehicles that must traverse the metropolis from north to south, and vice versa.
Besides, it is a strategic approach, since it would also link the Ninoy Aquino and Clark international airports, and provide better access to Manila’s ports.
This approach is similar to that taken by some of our neighbors, such as Singapore, Hong Kong and Bangkok, which have had to construct elevated roads because of the scarcity of available ground-level spaces.
Legal soundness
UNFORTUNATELY, four years after the proposal was first submitted, government authorities are still sitting on it, as if they expected to remain in office for more than six years. Every time MPTDC followed up on the project, it was told that the due diligence being done by the government was still in progress. Part of that due diligence, as officials of the Toll Regulatory Board (TRB) would tell them, was finding out if the project is legally sound.
I don’ think its legal soundness would take longer than one year, at the most, for the Department of Justice (DOJ) to rule on. Here is a clear case of foot-dragging or dilly-dallying by the bureaucracy.
But it soon became evident that it was the TRB that has been blocking the project all along, for reasons only it can—and must—explain.
No wonder the Aquino administration’s infrastructure-accomplishment record is so dismal. How can P-Noy soar like an eagle if he is working with a bunch of turkeys at the TRB?
It will be recalled that, in January, a group of “concerned citizens” wrote a letter to the Department of Transportation and Communications (DOTC), Department of Public Works and Highways, TRB, Philippine National Construction Corp. (PNCC) and the PPP Center on behalf of a group of foreign and local investors to ask if they could present a Swiss challenge to MPDTC’s unsolicited proposal.
But, as far as MPTDC was concerned, the letter from the so-called concerned citizens was obviously yet another way for the government to withhold action on its long-pending unsolicited proposal.
Incidentally, sometime before the letter was submitted, the DOTC asked MPTDC if it was amenable to doing the road-connector project in partnership with PNCC. The proposed partnership would make the project a government-private project under Presidential Decree 1894, instead of under the build-operate-transfer mode, which is also allowed by law.
Earlier, TRB Executive Director Edmundo Reyes Jr. announced that “certain legal issues” (which were not specified) were holding up the approval process. He cited private-sector opposition to the mode of implementation of the road-connector project. He also said the TRB had asked the DOJ to resolve those issues.
It’s a pity because, had the project been approved and allowed to start in the middle of last year, there would have been enough time to complete it before President Aquino’s term ends. But obviously, that opportunity was wasted by those turkeys at the TRB. They seem to be working at cross-purposes with higher economic-planning authorities.
As we Filipinos would say in Filipino, sayang. The project would have been the sixth among the infrastructure deliverables that the PPP Center could have proudly announced during the Philippine Economic Briefing on September 30.
E-mail: omerta_bdc@yahoo.com.
Image credits: Jimbo Albano