“There is, however, every possibility that the fund will be fully spent but the road that the Estehanons will get may not be the first-class road that they have been dreaming of.”
by Ducky Paredes
Estehanons (the people of Eastern Samar) are seeing the moral equivalent of the Balangiga Massacre about to happen. They live in one of the poorest provinces in the country and need all the help it can get in terms of infrastructure and, in fact, a P500 million fund is available from the 2010 budget of the DPWH.
Bad roads have been the scourge of Eastern Samar. This scenic province, were it not for its inadequate road network, could have long joined the tourism mainstream with its world-class beaches and wondrous eco-tourism offerings and lure investors in. This is an area of so much potential. Just recently the province achieved the impossible: with little help from outside, it broke loose from the damning list of the Club 20 (the poorest of the poor) provinces.
So when the 2010 national budget included a P500 million road construction fund for Eastern Samar that would cover 20 kilometers of the main Wright-Taft-Borongan-Guiuan section of the national highway, there was rejoicing all over. The overwhelming sense was that, finally, here is the answer to the weak link in the overall development efforts of Eastern Samar.
This is the single, biggest infrastructure investment for a highway project in the province in years. This is, no matter how one looks at it, a big blessing to a province that is badly wanting in major infrastructure investments.
There is, however, every possibility that the fund will be fully spent but the road that the Estehanons will get may not be the first-class road that they have been dreaming of.
Under the Government Procurement Act, the law that reformed the bidding of government projects and services, the P500 million fund is ideally covered by projects that are to be put up for public bidding as a whole and intact. The fund covers a single stretch of Eastern Samar ’s main highway. There has to be uniformity in structural integrity and standards. The national offices of the DPWH, because of the size of the fund and the project’s importance to the economy of Eastern Samar, should be in charge of the bidding and the awards process to ensure full transparency and integrity.
But based on the status of the bidding process right now, what is taking place is far from ideal, proper and legal.
The district engineer of Eastern Samar, Ernesto Paderes and Rep. Teodolo Coquilla of the province’s lone congressional district, have been moving to chop up the project. Why? Obviously, they want to be in control of the bidding process. A public bid for a project worth P500 million is out of Paderes’s league and jurisdiction. To make the bidding “local” – under the jurisdiction of his engineering district, he has to make sure the P500 million projects is sliced and diced into bite-sized pieces.
The dastardly plan began in Congress itself. The DPWH spending provision on the P500 million Estehano roads is a project of two packages broken down into 12 projects. The amounts of the 12 vary, the smallest projects are worth P20 million, and others are worth P40 million and P50 million. And two of the 12 projects are worth P60 million each.
This is weird and unprecedented. Big, single infra investments for a single stretch of a highway are normally written as that – a single spending item. What happened in Congress? A legislator known for his vulgar and meddling ways arm-twisted the DPWH into chopping, slicing and dicing the P500 million fund.
So Paderes and his patron Coquilla want to bid out the P500 million via the chop-chopped version , which runs counter to the DPWH practices and the Government Procurement Act’s prohibition against the splitting of contracts .
Because the bidding rules of the DPWH provide that district engineers like Paderes can bid out projects worth P20 million and below (with regional offices of the DPWH taking care of projects from P20 million up to P200 million and the central offices of the DPWH taking care of all projects above P200 million), Paderes , with Coquilla’s recommendation, is asking Secretary Vic Dominguez for authority to bid all components of the road project worth P50 million and below .
This is not a usual practice among district engineers. But Paderes’ formal request to get an exemption from the bidding cap, if granted, would result in one thing – he can personally bid out all 10 of the 12 components of the P500 million road project .
If Secretary Dominguez says OK, Paderes will get almost full control of the bidding process for the P500 million road fund and this is the nightmare that Estehanons fear. What kind of road will they get if the “locals” take over that fund?
Secretary Vic Dominguez has held off deciding on the matter . Regional Director Twano has been lukewarm to Paderes’s brazen efforts at controlling the bidding process .
Although , they have not been vocal about their reasons for reining in Paderes’s enthusiasm to slice and bid, the underlying reasons are obvious: the road project cannot be chopped up and awarded trough a dubious bidding . It is also a good thing that Budget Secretary Nonoy Andaya has withheld funds for the project. Clearly, he shares the same concerns and fears of the Estehanons.
The structural integrity of the P500 million road has to be guaranteed, something which is doubtful in a bidding staged-managed by Paderes, under Coquilla’s patronage.
If President Arroyo wants to leave a lasting legacy to the Estehanons, she should order the bidding of the P500 million infra project as a whole. This is the only sway that the Estehanons will have 20 kilometers of road that will last them for a lifetime.
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hvp 01.20.10
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