Watchdog accuses DPWH of bungling road work

BAGUIO CITY—An anticorruption watchdog has blamed Public Works Secretary Rogelio Singson for what it said was the mess that delayed and irregular road projects have left on traffic situations in many areas nationwide.

Ricardo Ramos, head of the Citizens Infrastructure Integrity Watchdog (InfraWatch), on Wednesday said Singson is to blame for the project delays.

Singson, according to Ramos, ordered a review of all projects to ensure these were graft-free, forcing regional public works offices to implement these projects at a bad time—the start of the rainy season.

Ramos said quality control was swept aside because project engineers are rushing to complete the projects before New Year.

“Singson bungled it” and his actions must now be reviewed by the Commission on Audit and Malacañang, said Ramos, a businessman.

In a series of text messages, Singson said Ramos was mistaken.

Singson said all he did was enforce “the discipline of bidding projects properly with good programs of work.”

“It was a choice between spending without proper programs of work and just wasting for the sake of spending public funds,” Singson said. He said in the past programs of work were out of sync with what was really needed.

He said at least 70 percent of projects that are in the pipeline had to be realigned “for some valid reason” like these had been completed or were duplications of other projects.

He said he discouraged asphalt overlays on damaged roads and preferred projects to widen roads that include drainage systems.

Ramos, however, said Singson had moved the start of road projects too much that their start coincided with the rainy season, which resulted in more delays and traffic bottlenecks in many areas.

According to Ramos, he personally checked such projects in Baguio and La Trinidad, Benguet.

What he found, according to Ramos, was a pattern of inefficiency and anomalies which was first detected in Tarlac, the home province of President Aquino.

The start of the rainy season and onslaught of storms have further delayed road projects, Ramos said.

Many roads that are being repaired were in good condition before government workers tore them up only to abandon these when the rains started to come, he said.

“Do you know why the contractors destroyed the roads first even when they were not ready to replace them immediately with concrete?” Ramos said. “So the public will no longer see their original condition.”

Some of the projects, he said, all but blocked other roads meant as bypass or alternate routes for motorists.

One of these blocked roads, he said, was the Buyagan Road in La Trinidad that motorists are supposed to take to avoid road work on a section of a Baguio road connected to La Trinidad’s main highway.

As a result of the road work, travel from La Trinidad to Baguio, which normally takes only 15 minutes, now lasts for 45 minutes to an hour.

The same suffering befell motorists in Nueva Vizcaya, where shoddy road repairs have been blamed for accidents and a worsening traffic bottleneck.

“It is in times like these when you could really think of torching heavy equipment out of disgust. Our government is so useless,” complained Dominador Suguitan, an overseas worker from Echague, Isabela, who missed his Thursday morning flight to Singapore because of heavy traffic. With a report from Melvin Gascon, Inquirer Northern Luzon