More provincial roads have been allocated funds, Gov. Edgar Chatto, disclosed on Friday’s Kita Ug Ang Gobernador program.
Reading off a letter from the Bureau of the Treasury, the notice of allocation was for a total of P436million for 4 provincial roads, Chatto said.
The funding was granted under the Kalsada program, now the Conditional Matching Grant to Provinces for Road Repair, Rehabilitation and Improvement.
Under the program, P302M was allocated for the following priority areas: P116M for Alegria- Catigbian-Baang-Hagbuaya road; P109M for Pagnituan-Tabuan-Basac road in Maribojoc; P83M for Canmanico-Anonang road in Valencia. It also provided for P134M to follow for Dimiao-Oac road in Bilar.
Launched as Konkreto at Ayos na Lansangan at Daan Tungo sa Pangkalahatang Kaunlaran (KALSADA), the Kalsada Program was developed based on the Bohol experience of the Provincial Roads Management Facility (PRMF) program in Bohol, which was supported by AusAID and DFAT.
PRMF was a partnership project in governance reforms through local road projects where provincial roads were paved while putting in place reforms in government processes such as procurement, audit, revenue collection, information technology, among others.
Chatto lobbied the program to the League of Provinces of the Philippines highlighting Bohol road situation where nationalization of 100 kilometers of roads was made possible through laws passed when Chatto was then congressmen to tourism infrastructure convergence projects under the Chatto-Gordon Tourism Act of 2009.
The local roads program was built on the successes in local roads management under the Bohol-PRMF partnership, where local road reforms included aspects of good governance through local road management, rehabilitation and upgrading of provincial roads and turning over maintenance to the Provincial Government, development of a Provincial Road Network Development Plan, and establishment of city and provincial locational referencing system for baseline data purposes.
According to DILG and DBM, under the Conditional Matching Grant to Provinces for Road Repair, Rehabilitation and Improvement program, provincial roads will rehabilitated and upgraded, and then transferred permanently to the provincial government for maintenance. The program will also develop the Provincial Road Network Development Plan (PRNDP) for each province and promote the use of an online open data portal as a mechanism for monitoring and evaluation of provincial roads.
Provinces are selected based on their compliance with the Department of Interior and Local Government’s (DILG) Seal of Good Financial Housekeeping and submission to the Department of Budget and Management (DBM) of their Local Public Financial Management Assessment Report.
Allocations, on the other hand, are determined by a combination of performance and need criteria, such as inclusion in the Budget Priorities Framework provinces, utilization and completion of local road projects under the Special Local Roads Fund (SLRF), as well as regular appropriation and use of maintenance funds for local roads.
The program began with a P16 billion allocation for 2016, grew to P18billion for 2017, and then P26billion for 2018.
“What this means for Bohol and other provinces: with Kalsada or matching grants program, provincial roads will have been concreted in 5 years”, Chatto said. (Leah/EDCOM)