The House committee on Metro Manila development will inspect on Wednesday the proposed site of the railway common station before determining whether or not to approve the deal.
Quezon City Rep. Winston Castelo, committee chair, said that lawmakers would have to check first the “seamlessness” of the proposed common station linking Metro Rail Transit Line 3 (MRT-3), Light Rail Transit Line 1, and the future MRT-7 at the parking lot between SM City North Edsa and TriNoma.
According to him, the “overriding factor” that will determine the House’s concurrence with the Jan. 18 memorandum of agreement (MoA) is the convenience of commuters who will have to walk to the common station to change railway lines.
“That’s the very purpose of our inspection on Wednesday—to determine whether or not to honor the MoA or to fund whatever financial requirement is there in the MoA or not,” Castelo said in a radio interview on Sunday.
“If Congress will not fund it, there will be no MoA at all to speak of,” he added.
Castelo said that Congress would “insist that this benefit the commuters so they would not have to walk” long distances.
He pointed out that the new MoA not only increased the walking distance, it also bloated the station’s cost to P2 billion from the original P700 million (P200 million of which was supposed to be shouldered by SM Prime Holdings, Inc., in exchange for naming rights).
Castelo stressed the need to scrutinize the deal because almost 800,000 commuters were expected to use the common station daily.
Under a 2009 agreement between the Light Rail Transit Authority and SM Prime, the station was supposed to be located next to the SM City North Edsa Annex which is nearer to LRT-1 than TriNoma.
However, the Department of Transportation and Communications in 2013 moved the common station nearer to TriNoma, prompting SM Prime to sue the government and the Supreme Court to issue a temporary restraining order in 2014.