FOLLOWING recent reports from the Commission on Audit (COA) flagging Baguio City for its unimplemented projects and low development fund utilization, City Administrator Bonifacio Dela Peña is assuring that the city is now working to address its low implementation rate.
According to the administrator, the city has identified factors leading to the extremely low development fund utilization rate of only eight percent.
He said that for smaller projects worth P250,000 or less, the amount of money involved is too low for contractors to be interested, leading to failure in bidding.
Said issue will be addressed by consolidating such small projects into larger, higher impact project bundles that will be more attractive for prospecting contractors to bid on, he said, with approval of the city’s Bids and Awards Committee (BAC) as well as the local barangay units, with consolidation underway.
Meanwhile, he said that in order to address the lack of implementation of high impact projects, some of which are due to be completed this year and some of which are experiencing delays in implementation, the local City Buildings and Architecture Office (CBAO), City Engineering Office (CEO) and City Environment and Parks Management Office (CEPMO) have come to an agreement with the Baguio City Council to move up the date of approval of the annual budget in order to have funds for the projects projects available earlier.
According to the Commission on Audit (COA), Baguio City only utilized P79.96 million out of its available P1.023 billion funding for development projects in 2022 – a mere eight percent of the total.
In a 211 page report, the COA said Baguio City only “fully implemented” 96 programs, projects, and activities (PPAs) out of 539, with another 96 listed as “partially implemented” and the remaining 347 “not implemented.”
COA flagged the underutilization of the funds, stating that the projects were time-bound and their lack of implementation hampered the delivery of services to Baguio residents.
