DARAGA, Albay—President Rodrigo Duterte has vowed to finish building the P4.7-billion Bicol International Airport in three years with a fresh budget and a decisive push following years of delays.
Duterte led the airport’s groundbreaking rites last Thursday in Barangay Alobo here—his first visit to Albay since becoming President—to assure local government officials, business leaders and residents the BIA will be completed on time.
The project is key to the long-awaited economic growth of the province and the entire Bicol Region, said Albay second district Rep. Joey Sarte Salceda, the original proponent of the airport.
Duterte’s speedy action “has infused new life to the project never felt since its inception over a decade ago,” Salceda said.
Thanking Duterte for his “decisive action” on the BIA, the lawmaker now feels confident the international airport will sustain the gains of Albay tourism, attained during his term as governor, which posted an impressive record of 339,000 foreign tourist arrivals in 2015 from a measly 8,700 in 2007.
He praised the President as a “good man who genuinely cares for his people—his heart is in the right place, his guts and gut feel honed by years as local chief executive, which make him fit for the challenges of nation building.”
Together with the new Southline component of the North-South Railways Project, which the Duterte cabinet also approved recently, Salceda said he is convinced “foreign tourist arrivals can triple to 1.2 million by 2025, and thus make Albay an economic powerhouse.”
During the recent assembly of Bicol political leaders of the Federalismo Alyansa Bicol, the President referred to Salceda as his “longtime friend and one of the brilliant economic minds of the country, who should be working instead in Malacañang.”
Salceda conceptualized and pushed for the BIA project since 2005 under President Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo, when he represented Albay’s third district. He worked on it for nine years since 2007 as governor and as chairman of the Bicol Regional Development Council.
Duterte, Salceda said, did in four months what the previous administration failed to do in three years: award Phase 2A, the land-side component of the project worth P780 million, and bid out the passenger terminal building worth P1.8 billion.
The BIA’s Phase 2A includes 17 buildings and land-side facilities. Phase 2B covers the completion of its runway, apron, “two-stub taxiway,” and Passenger Terminal Building which were recently bidded out.
Salceda said Transportation Secretary Art Tugade promised him the BIA will have passenger boarding bridges or tubes, two of which will initially be installed, each costing P105 million. Its design can accommodate additional tubes in the future.
The snail-paced implementation of the BIA project by the past Department of Transportation and Communications has so frustrated Salceda and compelled him to take “political action” during the May 2016 elections—to run as an independent candidate.
Arroyo had approved the BIA in April 2005, and was included in the government’s Medium Term Development Plan. Its initial appropriation was made in 2006, when Salceda was chairman of the House Appropriations Committee. The project was affirmed by the succeeding administration, but work on it slackened due to slow releases of funds, he said.
Salceda worked with President Duterte’s economic managers from the start of the administration. As vice chairman of the House Appropriations Committee, he pushed the administration’s 2017 budget for economic development.
Tugade has also assured Salceda his department will start working on the P271-billion North-South Railways Project’s Southline stretch from Manila to Legazpi. He committed in a recent Cabinet meeting that the Southline will be finished in four years.
