Duterte tells contractors to shape up

CEBU CITY—President Duterte has ordered his assistant for the Visayas to crack the whip on contractors in charge of building new communities for survivors of Supertyphoon “Yolanda” (international name: “Haiyan”) in a town in northern Cebu province.

Michael Dino, presidential assistant for the Visayas, said he had been given instructions by Mr. Duterte to check on the progress of projects to build relocation sites for Yolanda survivors in the town of Daanbantayan, Cebu, one of the areas hit hard by the 300-kph storm.

As a result, Dino said he had ordered the contractor of the relocation site to turn over housing units to the survivors before the end of the year.

Dino, heeding the President’s order, visited northern towns of Cebu province that were battered by Yolanda in 2013 to check on the status of projects that would help survivors get back on their feet.

Among these projects is a P187-million relocation site in the village of Maya in Daanbantayan, which sits on a 5.5-hectare land.

It was the first project that Dino visited. It would have been the site of 650 houses, each measuring 25 square meters, for Yolanda survivors.

The project had been awarded to Hi-Tri Development Corp.

“I feel bad because we’ve been waiting for this for a long time,” Dino said during his visit to the project site.

But Joseph Densing, project engineer, said the contractor could turn over only 36 units by next month. Project completion is seen by May next year, said Densing.

Densing said the contractor continues to have difficulty securing permits from the local government unit of Daanbantayan, some 123 kilometers north of this city and located at the northern tip of Cebu province.

More than three years after Yolanda struck, the National Housing Authority (NHA), the agency tasked with building new houses for the storm survivors, has yet to complete a single resettlement site that would serve as new communities for people who lost homes during the storm.

Vice President Leni Robredo, Mr. Duterte’s housing czar, had promised to fill the massive backlog in housing units for Yolanda survivors.

According to Dino, he would also visit projects for Yolanda survivors in Bantayan Island, Cebu province where three towns—Bantayan, Sta. Fe and Madridejos—had also been devastated by Yolanda.