A 2027 deadline meets a 2023 reality

Carlos Primo David wants Iloilo City to have a new bulk water supply running by 2027. He said it on May 7, after a courtesy call with Mayor Raisa Treñas-Chu, and he picked his words for emphasis: now or never. The undersecretary at the Department of Environment and Natural Resources, who heads its Water Resources Management Office, is right about the urgency. Whether the timeline survives contact with the actual machinery of building a water system is another matter entirely.

Consider Davao. The Aboitiz-led Apo Agua Infrastructura signed its bulk water agreement with the Davao City Water District in 2015, broke ground in late 2018, and only went fully operational on December 1, 2023 — eight years from contract to tap, and that was with a sitting president attending the kickoff. Iloilo’s PHP 5.12 billion deal with Aboitiz InfraCapital was approved by the city council last December. Eighteen months later, the agency that issues the permit is promising water by next year. The math does not work, and pretending otherwise is how public trust gets quietly drained.

The bigger problem is not the deadline. It is the diffusion of who owns it. The Water Resources Management Office grants the permits. The National Water Resources Board juggles the six competing applications David mentioned. The Metro Iloilo Water District and Metro Pacific Iloilo Water distribute. City Hall approves. Aboitiz InfraCapital builds — if it builds. When something slips, and something will, no single office is left holding the bag.

We saw a preview of that last week. Metro Pacific Iloilo Water publicly complained about an eight-month permit delay for its desalination plant in Barangay Ingore, La Paz. Treñas-Chu checked with the Office of the Building Official and reported the application was filed only on March 26, 2026, and still has deficiencies. She also noted, almost in passing, that she and the company share a Viber group “for immediate coordination.” Whatever else that is, it is not a paper trail. A city negotiating PHP 5-billion-class infrastructure deserves something more durable than chat threads and dueling press releases.

The numbers underneath all this are sobering. Metro Pacific Iloilo Water supplies 40 to 50 million liters per day to the metropolis and, by its own figures, has only met 26 percent of the city’s water needs in more than five years of operation. Its bulk supplier, the Metro Iloilo Bulk Water Supply Corporation, “appears to be capable of delivering 30 to 50 mld, far below the 170 mld initially promised.”

The Philippine Institute for Development Studies, in a 2025 paper covering 532 water districts, found that annual demand consistently exceeds effective supply, contributing to persistent service gaps even as 87.7 percent of the population is reported to have access to safe water. Access on paper is not water in the pipe.

So here is what would actually move things. The Department of Environment and Natural Resources should publish the engineering basis for the 2027 target — land secured, environmental compliance certificates in hand, source water rights settled — or revise the date in public. City Hall should put David’s four-sector redundancy idea before the Sangguniang Panlungsod with hearings, not handshakes. And every applicant before the National Water Resources Board should appear on a dated, public dashboard showing milestones, deficiencies, and decision points.

A deadline that holds is worth more than one that sounds good. Iloilo has waited long enough for the difference.