DOTC assures no delay in flagship projects

Transportation and Communications Secretary Leandro Mendoza has assured that the implementation and completion of the flagship projects of the agency, including foreign-funded ones, will not be delayed.

Robert Castanares, DOTC assistant secretary, also revealed that even those transportation projects that have encountered delays prior to Mendoza’s assumption late last year would finally take off because of the reforms being undertaken by the agency.

Castanares clarified that the snags in the implementation of DOTC projects before stemmed mainly from the fact that all project management offices (PMOs) were operating with very little supervision from top management.

"There were also problems on the acquisition of lands, and lapses in project management that resulted in low disbursement and accomplishment levels," he pointed out.

The assistant secretary said that for 2003, the DOTC has adopted the "perform and inform" strategy anchored on the fulfillment and delivery of President Arroyo’s eight-point agenda. The perform strategy’s basic thrust is the fast tracking of DOTC’s high-impact projects through basic reforms in the organization and system.

The inform strategy also focuses on improving pubic perception about DOTC through a pro-active media/communications plans that truthfully inform the public about the relevance of the DOTC’s infrastructure to their lives, he said.

Castanares added that this strategy also aims to humanize the DOTC and establish a connection between the common tao and the department’s economic initiative.

Castanares said among the agency’s most notable accomplishments is its exclusion from the list of corrupt agencies and the substantial increase in the revenue of the department and its attached agencies.

As an offshoot of the assessment conducted last January, Castanares said Mendoza has implemented the consolidation of project and their supervision by a project implementation officer in compliance with the Department of Budget and Management circular on unified PMO.

He said Mendoza has put up a project monitoring and control system and instituted a weekly coordination among all PMOs to discuss and resolve major bottlenecks and potential problems.

These also include the formation of a full-time land acquisition group in order to eliminate right-of-way acquisition bottlenecks.