A House leader on Friday backed the Budget department’s plan to use the funds of the would-be abolished Road Board to partly bankroll the cleanup of Manila Bay even as he called on the DBM to similarly consider setting aside a portion of this same outlay for flood mitigation projects, as earlier committed by President Rodrigo Duterte himself.
“While we welcome a DBM plan to tap the unused Road Board budget to partly bankroll the Manila Bay rehabilitation program, we are also appealing to the DBM to consider allocating a share of the same funds collected from the MVUC (Motor Vehicle Users’/User’s Charge) to solve the problem of perennial flooding, particularly in Bicol, as committed last January by President Duterte no less,” Camarines Sur Rep. Luis Raymund Villafuerte, vice chairman of the House Committee on Appropriations, said.
Villafuerte made the appeal to the DBM in response to earlier media reports in which Budget Secretary Benjamin Diokno as saying that the government could possibly use for the Manila Bay cleanup the MVUC collections, which would revert to the national treasury once the Road Board is abolished.
“So we will see if we can tap that,” Diokno was quoted as saying in a recent media forum of the idle MVUC funds.
Villafuerte recalled that during President Duterte’s visit to Camarines Sur last January following the onslaught of tropical depression ‘Usman,” the Chief Executive had reiterated his desire for the Congress to abolish the Road Board and committed the use of its MVUC funds to solve the perennial flooding in Bicol.
The Senate had adopted the House bill abolishing the Road Board, and the enrolled bill was eventually transmitted to Malacañang for President Duterte’s signing into law. Earlier reports bared that the available MVUC collections total P45 billion.
Villafuerte said solving Bicol’s chronic flooding problem will give a tremendous boost to farm productivity in CamSur, which is among the country’s top rice-producing provinces.
“Despite the perennial floods, CamSur has emerged as the No. 6 rice producer,” he added. “We could easily become No. 2 or No. 3 if the perennial floods will become a thing of the past.”
A former three-term governor of Camarines Sur, Villafuerte said the province is Bicol’s lowest-lying area, making it a catch basin from floodwaters coming from other provinces whenever typhoons strike the region.
During a situation briefing held in the province’s capital of Pili last January 4, Villafuerte had suggested to President Duterte that a viable solution to this perennial flooding problem is the dredging and desilting of the Bicol River.
He said that when he broached this proposal during that meeting, President Duterte declared he was bent on having the Road Board abolished and have its funds utilized for projects to mitigate the flooding problem, particularly in Bicol.
Among the other suggestions raised during that meeting with the President was the creation of a Bicol River Development Authority, which will be in charge of overseeing flood mitigation programs in coordination with the concerned local government units (LGUs) and the Department of Public Works and Highways (DPWH).
The House committee on government reorganization has already approved a bill authored by Villafuerte reviving the Bicol River Development Authority.
Education Secretary Leonor Briones informed the President during that same January meeting that such an agency had existed during the former Marcos administration, but it was eventually abolished, hence leaving no particular government office ever since to take charge of dredging the Bicol River or implementing other flood mitigation projects there.