The Public-Private Partnership Center has been hatching “ambitious projects,” particularly in areas where no private company has ventured.
Cosette Canilao, executive director of the PPP Center, said that even the relocation of informal settlers from estuaries and other waterways considered to be danger zones could be done through public-private partnership projects.
“We are looking at ways on how we can use PPPs to relocate informal settlers,” she said during a briefing last week.
Canilao said she had met with officials of the National Housing Authority and the Department of Public Works and Highways to discuss how they could push the project forward.
Right after the widespread floods at the height of the monsoon rains in August, the DPWH announced that 125,000 families from the waterways in Metro Manila and 70,000 around Laguna de Bay had to be immediately relocated.
“Private companies could help speed up the relocation of the informal settlers,” Canilao said.
Another project, she said, could be the redevelopment and restoration of heritage structures like the Old Manila Post Office and the Manila Metropolitan Theater.
“Let’s revive the beauty of old Manila. It’s been done in other countries like Singapore,” she said referring to Fullerton Hotel, once the General Post Office of Singapore.
“We are still studying what the private sector would prefer to do. Those are just possibilities,” Canilao said.
She explained that social infrastructure, normally carried out by the government, could prove difficult for private companies because they do not have any experience in dealing with such projects.
The first social infrastructure to be rolled out under the PPP program is the Department of Education’s project to build more than 10,000 classrooms nationwide.
Last Thursday, the Education department published an invitation to prequalify to bid for the second phase of the PPP project.
She said projects like that of the Education department could be passed on to the private sector as long as the costs are cheaper.
The PPP Center was created by Malacañang in 2010 to spearhead the planning, bidding and implementation of private-public partnership programs of the Aquino administration.
In 2012, eight of the planned 24 projects have been rolled out.
These projects are phases I and II of the Department of Education’s school infrastructure project, the Naia Expressway Project of the Department of Public Works and Highways, the operation and maintenance of LRT Line 1 Cavite Extension, the Contactless Automatic Fare Collection System and Mactan International Airport Terminal building of the Department of Transportation and Communications, the modernization of the Philippine Orthopedic Center under the Department of Health, and the rehabilitation and maintenance work on auxiliary turbines 4 and 5 of the Angat hydroelectric power plant implemented by the Metropolitan Waterworks and Sewerage System.
Canilao said contractors for six of the eight projects are set to start construction next year.