THE CONSTRUCTION of the new Senate building at the Bonifacio Global City in Taguig has all the elements of a controversy typical of many a government project – the lack of transparency, the exorbitant cost and the necessity vis-à-vis its actual benefit to the Filipino people.
Since 1997, the Senate has been paying a monthly rental of ₱7.8 million to the Government Service Insurance System for the use of its current building. Since 1996, it has also been leasing a Social Security System property for its parking lot, for another ₱500,000 per month. That is a total monthly overhead cost of ₱8.3 million for the government.
In 2000, then Senate president Aquilino Pimentel Jr. proposed the move for the Senate to relocate to a new dedicated building. This led to the construction of a new building in the Batasan area, amounting to ₱41.163. Unfortunately, the project was stopped and the building has since been used to house the Senate electoral tribunals and the House of Representatives.
It was not until 2017 when there had been a major progress in the construction of a new building. With the filing of PS Resolution No. 293 by Sen. Win Gatchalian, an ad hoc committee was created and was tasked “to conduct a feasibility study for the construction of a new Senate building.”
After choosing the winner in a design competition held in 2018, the ground breaking ceremony was held on March 18, 2019.
Whether the actual cost of the new building is ₱21 billion or ₱23 billion, it is by all measure very costly. In a country where government projects are awarded to contractors who have become willing and complicit participants in a corrupt bidding system, nothing much is to be expected. Talk about overpriced projects made substandard by the infamous “SOP system” from school buildings to covered courts, from barangay and national roads to bridges, the list is frustratingly endless.
The decision of the Department of Public Works and Highways to award the project to Hilmarc Construction Corp., the same construction firm involved in the overpriced ₱2.3-billion Makati City Hall Building II in 2014, leaves a definitive bad taste in the mouth. It is a red flag even for someone who is not trained in the intricacies of a standard audit system. While one cannot prevent lightning from striking again, one can at least take precautionary measures from being hit by the same lightning more than once, at the same time, at the same place and with the same magnitude.
In an interview, Sen. Allan Cayetano claims that politics has nothing to do with the flagging of the construction project and that his findings are backed up by documents. Is he referring to the same documents that were presented, reviewed and approved by the Senate even before the ground breaking started? Did the Senate members during that time deliberately overlook the said documents as they were part of another grand scheme to defraud the government? Was there a collusion among the then-sitting senators?
This leads me to ask whether this probe, which started less than two months after Sen. Chiz Escudero became the Senate president, is really fuelled by Sen. Cayetano’s intent desire to give the Filipino people the truth they deserve, or just another attempt at political grandstanding.
At a time when the Department of Education is yet to meet its annual backlogs on basic education requirements such as classrooms, textbooks and other learning facilities, billions are being spent on this controversial project.
At a time when the Department of Health, the Department of Social Welfare and Development and other government agencies are scrambling for a small slice of the national budget to provide basic services to the Filipinos, two senators cannot even agree whether the actual cost of the new Senate building is ₱21 billion or ₱23 billion.
If only the grandeur of the new building can be translated instantly to the same high level of competence and integrity of the lawmakers who will occupy it, by all means, let the government spend billions and even trillions. But all it takes is one look at the lawmakers roaming the august halls of the Senate today to make us realize that, to paraphrase Robert Malthus, while the cost of a new Senate building is increasing mathematically, the quality of lawmakers who occupy it is decreasing exponentially.
