Duterte admin shelves 3 flagship infra projects as ‘unfeasible’

President Rodrigo Duterte’s economic managers have decided to scrap from the original 75 flaship projects at least three bridges interconnecting major islands as “unfeasible” due to financial and technological constraints, the government’s chief economist said Friday.

An updated list of the administration’s flagship infrastructure initiatives will be released by the National Economic and Development Authority (NEDA) next week.

“What we have done is to take out certain projects that are impossible given the technology. Maybe that technology we don’t have it yet,” Socioeconomic Planning Secretary Ernesto Pernia told reporters in a press conference in Taguig City.

It’s available somewhere, but we still … don’t have the technology to build in very deep waters and long bridges,” Pernia noted.

“About three bridges—big projects—taken out ...” the Cabinet official noted.

These are the projects that have been shelved:

• The 18.2-kilometer Luzon (Sorsogon)-Samar bridge

• The 23-kilometer Leyte-Surigao bridge

• The 24.5-kilometer Cebu-Bohol bridge

“The Matnog, Sorsogon connecting Samar, we found to be unfeasible from the feasibility study in terms of economic viability and financial [cost],” Pernia noted.

“The Leyte to Surigao long bridge is also very deep and really just very challenging. It’s going to be very costly,” he said.

In the case of the Cebu-Bohol bridge, “the traffic doesn’t justify the construction.”

Despite having removed the three big-ticket projects, the Duterte administration is adding smaller projects to the 75 flagship list—making 100 the total number of projects.

The bridge projects that were scrapped will be “substituted with smaller projects” but “are game-changing for the regions.”

“It will be 100 ... because there will be smaller projects but still game-changing—especially for the regions that will be included which we did not include on the first list,” Pernia said.

Among the smaller projects to be added on the list are road projects under the Department of Public Works and Highways.

“We also included a number of PPP, private-public partnership projects,” Pernia said.

“By next week, we will release the specifics of the projects,” he added. —VDS, GMA News