Albay 1st District Rep. Edcel Lagman (INQUIRER FILES)
MANILA, Philippines — Albay 1st District Rep. Edcel Lagman has asked the Department of Public Works and Highways (DPWH) to ensure that ‘alien projects’ would not affect a Congressional district’s priority projects.
Lagman on Thursday, during his turn at the deliberations of P822.2 billion proposed funding for DPWH for 2024, said he supports the department’s allocation but noted that some ‘alien projects’ that have not been validated, yet are present in the proposed 2024 national budget or the National Expenditures Program (NEP).
The lawmaker explained in a message to reporters after his interpellation that alien projects refer to items in that “crept into the NEP proposed by persons without passing the prior scrutiny and validation” of the District Engineering Offices (DEO), which in turn affect a district’s amount ceiling while crowding out other priority infrastructure projects.
“We hope that in the submission of projects, for inclusion in the [NEP], these submissions must be cleansed of ‘alien projects’, which have not been validated and scrutinized by the [DEO],” Lagman told Public Works Secretary Manuel Bonoan.
“Since invariably, Mr. Chair, there is a ceiling on the amount of infrastructure projects for a particular district, and this ceiling is based on accepted standards, but we should make sure that the ceiling is not breached by these alien projects, and priority projects should not bumped by these projects,” he added.
In response, Bonoan said that this is the reason why DPWH has consulted Congress before crafting their budget, so that prioritization of infrastructure projects would be done in coordination with lawmakers per district.
“This is the very reason why your Honor in the preparation of the 2024 budget, we made sure that this is fully coordinated with the members of Congress, legislative, that the preparation of the 2024 budget, priorities would have to be in full coordination with the members of Congress, for the NEP allocation,” the DPWH chief explained.
“And this has been emphasized to all our district and regional offices. Actually, that whenever they are going to submit actually their proposed programs and projects under the regional budget proposals, we wanted to make sure that these are fully coordinated with the members of Congress and of course we wanted it to be, these projects would be aligned as well to the core program of the DPWH,” he added.