BAGUIO CITY – The Cordillera Office of the Department of Public Works and Highways (DPWH-CAR) disclosed it will conduct the required public bidding for various infrastructure projects in the agency’s regular infrastructure budget in the different parts of the region by January to ensure the projects bidded out will be funded based on the national expenditure program in the P.1 trillion annual budget of the national government.
DPWH-CAR regional director Engr. Tiburcio Canlas said that the region’s Bids and awards Committee (BAC) was directed to re-schedule the public bidding for various infrastructure projects funded by next year’s budget to ensure the programmed projects will be funded after President Rodrigo Duterte shall have signed the approved 2020 budget to prevent the occurrence of unfunded projects similar to what happened to the case of Ifugao in 2018 and Mountain Province this year.
While there is a directive from the agency’s central office for the conduct of early procurement for the programmed 2020 infrastructure projects, he pointed out it is difficult to explain to the contractors why the projects were bidded out short of award only to be given false hopes considering as the projects did not have fund allocations in the final list of projects funded under the national expenditure program.
He explained that such scenario already happened in the case of Ifugao last year where there was an early procurement or bidding for the programmed infrastructure projects but when the budget was signed into law and the list of projects were released, the multi-billion projects that were allocated for the province were not included resulting to heavy losses among contractors that participated in the bidding process.
The DPWH-CAR official added the same thing happened to the Mountain Province this year where some P1.85 billion worth of projects were bidded out through the early procurement program late last year but the said budget was slashed to only P167 million that significantly affected the implementation of infrastructure projects in the province and the non-implementation of priority rehabilitation projects to improve the condition of roads and bridges within the landlocked province.
According to him, it is unfair to the contractors who will be spending for the purchase of their bidding documents and spend time, effort and resources to prepare their respective bid for their desired projects only to have these projects become unfunded under the approved national expenditure program.
Canlas claimed DPWH officials should understand their predicament in the regional and district offices because they do not want to give false hopes to the contractors participating in the public bidding process for the different programmed infrastructure projects regionwide next year, thus, the best remedy decided by the DPWH-CAR was to re-schedule the bidding process for all projects in the region by January or after the release of the final list of funded projects under the national expenditure program.
By HENT
