DAVAO CITY—President-elect Rodrigo Duterte will ask Congress to grant him emergency powers to deal with traffic situation in Metro Manila, the Transportation Secretary-designate Arthur Tugade said on Monday.
Tugade said Duterte wants the emergency powers to last for two years so that he can directly contract out transportation-related projects, open private subdivision roads to traffic and remove transport terminals and public markets located on busy thoroughfares.
“The image of the Republic of the Philippines is being damned by transportation and traffic. If this is not a crisis, what is?” he said, noting the Japan International Cooperation Agency has studied the situation and found that the country loses P2.4 billion daily due to traffic.
“[That’s] on traffic and transportation alone, you multiply that [P2.4 billion] by 365 days a year. How many years has the government failed to give solutions to that problem,” he said.
Tugade said previous administrations have tried to solve the crisis, but has failed due to the same problems after being blocked by court orders or by local government units.
“We all need to make sacrifices,” he said, assuring that the Duterte administration will comply with laws on property and just compensation.
“It will not be unreasonable because if you borrow roads from subdivisions, you have to compensate them also for road maintenance, for security,” he added.
“It will not be exercised capriciously and arbitrarily. It will have to be exercised in the interest of the majority and the interest of common good,” Tugade said. “It must not be whimsical, it must not be arbitrary.”
Tugade said that the group of incoming Justice Secretary Vitaliano Aguirre, incoming Solicitor General Jose Calida and incoming Presidential Chief Legal Adviser Salvador Panelo, have been studying the proposal, whose target implementation will run for two years.
“It’s not perpetual. This emergency power is not without precedent. Hopefully when Congress [convenes] then we will present our draft. Even now, we are already talking about it,” he said.
“Hopefully it can be a dramatic reduction,” he added.