MANILA, Philippines — Some congressional districts have huge budgets for infrastructure in 2021 to fund their big-ticket infrastructure projects, Department of Public Works and Highways (DPWH) Secretary Mark Vilar explained on Thursday.
“Just to inform the public on all these accusations, remember per district it really depends. There are some districts that happened to have high-ticket, big-ticket infrastructure budgets that are being implemented,” he said in an interview with ABS-CBN News Channel.
“We talk about some of our high-tickets. Now, it falls in a district. I don’t think it should be considered negative or unfair in any way. Because a lot of these projects have to go through a very stringent process of vetting,” he added.
Villar also explained that some DPWH projects are “continuous projects” that need to spread-out funding across many years.
“For instance, there is a bypass, not all bypasses we can fund in a single year. So we just want a portion of the bypass every year and we will continue it in subsequent years,” he said.
The DPWH was earlier flagged by President Rodrigo Duterte as a department ridden with corruption, as he ordered a Department of Justice-led task force to focus on investigating alleged anomalies in the agency.
Presidential Anti-Corruption Commissioner Greco Belgica earlier said the head of the DPWH should be the sole authority in the selection of engineers and contractors to help fight corruption in government infrastructure projects.
Villar, however, said he does not have the authority to select contractors as the selection will have to undergo the normal procurement process.
“I don’t have the authority to select contractors. That is really a procurement process. That’s Republic Act 9184 (Government Procurement Reform Act). I think maybe what he (Belgica) meant is the selection of the district engineers or people in position,” he said.
“For me, I don’t even want to be the one to [select]. I want the system to be the one to make the choice because obviously it should be performance-based in any good organization. So you create the metrics on their performance and then you base whatever decisions you make on the performance,” he added.
RELATED STORIES
DPWH budget caused Cayetano’s ‘downfall’ – lawmaker
House quarrel traced to unequal ‘pork slices’