Plus and minuses

The start of a new year is a good way to see where we are as far as pending government promises and projects are concerned. There are plus and minuses… developments that give us hope and those that make us more cynical.

We opened the year with the long festering passport crisis reaching to boiling point. Passport applicants are complaining that there are no available appointment dates earlier than six months from now.

 At the Manila City Hall, a mobile passport processing unit was mobbed with hundreds of people trying to get that elusive travel document. A video showing that incident has had over 100,000 views. 

The sad thing about that passport mess is that Foreign Secretary Alan Peter Cayetano appears insensitive to it, like Mar Roxas was to transport woes. This inability to meet passport needs is anti-poor because they need to work abroad. The crisis shows Cayetano’s sheer lack of managerial competence … and to think he wants to be president.

At LTO, we still don’t have car license plates, but maybe that’s not such a grave matter now since car dealers have been producing temporary plates based on conduction stickers. That should do for now. But it seems the fresh attempt to bid out supply of the car plates will end up in a similar legal mess as the one during P-Noy’s watch. We never learn.

On the plus side, there has been a number of groundbreaking ceremonies presided over by DOTr Sec. Art Tugade. Last week, they broke ground for the Taguig Integrated Terminal Exchange (ITX), a big-ticket infrastructure project that will hopefully help decongest vehicular traffic on EDSA.

The best part of this story is that Sec. Tugade managed to convince Ayala to forgo the P277 million Annual Grantor Payment or AGP, which is supposed to be paid to Ayala Land on a yearly basis for 35 years. That’s savings to government of some P9 billion.

I agree with Sec. Tugade that we should “stop the practice and paradigm of government paying the private sector royalty as they operate terminals.”

Additionally, Tugade announced that from the start of its commercial operation, until the end of the concession agreement, ALI will share two percent of their income from the commercial spaces in favor of the government.

Upon completion, provincial buses will no longer add to the volume of traffic on EDSA and other metro streets. Close to 200,000 passengers from Southern Luzon, Visayas and Mindanao are expected to use the terminal. It is expected to start operation by the 1st half of 2020.

BCDA also broke ground for the construction of a new passenger terminal for Clark International Airport. Target completion date is first quarter 2020.

Megawide won that bid and based on their track record, there is reason to hope they will meet that target. According to BCDA’s Vince Dizon, they started excavating and clearing last Dec. 20, 2017.

Finally completed is the Communication Navigation Surveillance/Air Traffic Management (CNS/ATM) of CAAP. This had been a long delayed project that replaces our aging terrestrial system with a satellite-based air traffic management system.

Then DOTC Sec. Ping de Jesus once wrote me to say that “our target date of completion is at the end of 2013.” But after Ping resigned, his successor, Mar Roxas placed the project on an indefinite hold supposedly for further review.

A press release of DOTr under Sec. Tugade a year ago promised to inaugurate the project by the end of June 2017. When I visited the facility October 2016, completion date was set for first quarter of 2017. But it was further delayed when engineers refused to go to some areas in Mindanao. They had to hire Iraqi engineers to finish the job.

As I wrote in this column a year ago, this GPS-based CNS/ATM system will cover the entire Philippines and has 48 monitoring points. It is essentially a traffic and communication system that provides in real time more accurate information of arrival, departures, aircraft position at any one time anywhere in the Philippine flight information region.

It will facilitate air space management, air traffic flow management and thus help alleviate the traffic jam over NAIA skies. This system will enhance air traffic safety, provide more dynamic flight planning, minimize delays and reduce air traffic controller workload. It puts the Philippine air navigation system at par with modern airports around the world. 

We have previously been known in aviation circles as a blackhole in the region. All our neighbors have sophisticated satellite-based communication and navigation systems while we relied on an outdated and often non-operational land-based radar system. The system will also enable us to bill airlines using our airspace enroute to other countries, income we have been foregoing.

Speaking of airports, completion of the rapid exit taxiways at NAIA is urgent to help relieve flight delays. According to Usec Skee Tamayo, the project will be completed by July this year. It is taking time because they are only able to work in the early morning hours when Ruinway 06/24 is closed for maintenance, so as not to disrupt operations.

The rapid exit taxiways will enable an aircraft to leave the lone international runway quickly after landing and allow more flights to land and take off. Mar Roxas offered this as a tentative solution to air traffic congestion, but did nothing to get it done.

The LRT-1 extension to Cavite has also started construction and should be heaven-sent to commuters once it is completed by 2021. It is being undertaken as a PPP with a consortium composed of Ayala and Metro Pacific. 

They are expecting DOTr and NEDA to act soon on the unsolicited proposal of San Miguel to build a new international airport in Bulacan. Also awaiting government action are competing proposals from a consortium of top conglomerates and Megawide/ SSS for the rehabilitation of NAIA.

 I think we are finally getting past the starting gate. This should be a really busy year for Build Build Build. I really hope they succeed, for our sake.

Boo Chanco’s e-mail address is [email protected]. Follow him on Twitter @boochanco.