Following the flood control money in Iloilo

By the Institute of Contemporary Economics, with assistance from the UP National College of Public Administration and Governance

We did not start this review because of a scandal.

With national headlines circling around alleged irregularities in flood control spending, sure, the question was going to reach Iloilo eventually — what exactly is being built here? But for us, the question came from a different place.

We were already deep into building the Iloilo Basin & Water Security Reform (2026–2035) Roadmap, a ten-year structural blueprint meant to overhaul how the Tigum–Aganan–Jaro–Iloilo River system gets managed.

The whole idea is to drag Iloilo out of reactive flood mitigation and into actual coordinated basin management — upstream attenuation, floodplain reconnection, tidal control, urban storage, water supply resilience, all woven into one hydraulic strategy.

And somewhere along the way, we hit the obvious wall: before you redesign a system, you have to understand what the existing one actually looks like.

So we pulled 167 flood control projects in Iloilo Province and ran them through the structured red-flag screening methodology developed by UP NCPAG. We weren’t looking for criminal liability. We wanted to see patterns — governance patterns and hydraulic patterns both.

What came back tells two different stories.

PHP 7.34 BILLION WORTH OF PROJECTS

The 167 projects total roughly PHP 7.34 billion. They cover Iloilo City and surrounding municipalities — drainage systems, revetments, channel improvements, slope protection, the usual flood mitigation infrastructure.

Under the UP NCPAG red-flag taxonomy, here’s how they broke down: only 13.8% came out fully “Green Flag.” About 33.5% showed fragmentation characteristics — what gets called “Chop-Chop.”

A striking 42.5% had pricing similarity patterns, or “Doppelganger” flags. Another 18.6% were flagged as “Potentially Ghost.” And nearly half — 48.5% — showed prolonged implementation timelines, the “Siyam-Siyam” pattern.

To be clear: these are indicators, not verdicts. Red flags point to structural procurement risks. They don’t prove corruption.

Compared to national outliers, Iloilo doesn’t land among the most extreme anomaly clusters. But the overlap of multiple flags across the portfolio is significant enough that closer technical and procurement scrutiny would be warranted.

That’s the first story. The second one might matter more in the long run.

SO WHAT ARE WE ACTUALLY BUILDING?

Map the projects against the physical structure of the Iloilo basin and a pattern starts to emerge — not a reassuring one.

Most of the spending falls into three buckets: urban drainage upgrades, riverbank hardening and revetments, and channel lining with concrete flood mitigation structures.

What’s conspicuously absent? Upstream retarding basins. Floodplain reconnection corridors. Distributed wetland storage. Diversion channels sized for peak attenuation. Integrated tidal gate modernization. Basin-wide hydraulic modeling. Multi-use storage linked to water security.

Put simply: the portfolio is heavy on downstream concrete, light on upstream storage.

Here’s why that matters. Flood risk in Iloilo is basin-driven, not barangay-driven. Water flows from the Tigum–Aganan watershed into the Jaro River, through low-lying urban corridors, and out to the Iloilo Strait. When heavy rainfall hits during high tide, you get hammered from both directions — upstream surge and downstream backflow at the same time.

Concrete revetments protect banks. Drainage upgrades reduce localized ponding. Fine. But without upstream attenuation and distributed storage, peak volumes still arrive. They just arrive faster and hit harder.

The system mitigates; it does not attenuate. There’s a critical difference.

THE MISSING LINK: DRINKING WATER

There’s another angle that rarely comes up in flood control debates, and frankly it should.

Iloilo has recurring water supply constraints. Peak demand keeps straining existing sources. New bulk supply options — desalination, augmentation from Jalaur — are being explored, all at significant cost.

Meanwhile, Iloilo gets about 2,000 millimeters of rainfall a year.

Think about that for a moment. The same water that floods barangays during monsoon season gets discharged straight into the sea. A few months later, cities scramble looking for additional supply.

This is the classic Philippine silo problem. Flood control moves water away. Water supply looks for more water. Two separate bureaucracies, two separate budgets, two separate planning horizons, same resource.

The Iloilo Basin & Water Security Reform Roadmap proposes breaking that wall down. Reframe rainfall as both hazard and resource. Upstream retarding basins can shave peak flood heights by 15–25 percent. Distributed wetlands can store hundreds of megaliters. Urban detention parks can double as capture systems. Managed floodplain storage becomes part of a raw water buffer.

This would be one of the first comprehensive efforts in the Philippines to formally integrate basin-level flood control and urban water security under a single hydraulic framework.

The current project portfolio doesn’t come close to reflecting any of that.

FRAGMENTATION VS. SYSTEM DESIGN

The spending pattern in Iloilo mirrors what’s happening nationally — reactive, segmented, politically visible, and concrete-heavy.

But floods don’t respect project boundaries since they are systemic events.

When you design projects one river segment at a time without basin-wide modeling, consequences ripple out in ways nobody planned for. You increase conveyance without attenuation. You harden banks without reducing volume. Water moves faster — but not necessarily safer.

The absence of a calibrated basin hydraulic model across the entire portfolio is hard to ignore. Same goes for the lack of coordinated tidal gate modernization or real-time telemetry.

This is not a corruption narrative but a structural diagnosis. And in some ways, it’s the harder problem to fix.

WHERE THIS GOES

The Roadmap identifies an estimated PHP 19.5–36 billion investment envelope over ten years to close structural gaps — upstream attenuation, distributed storage, tidal synchronization, integrated water resilience.

That doesn’t mean scrapping existing projects. It means reorganizing them into something that functions as a coherent basin system rather than a collection of standalone works.

The real choice facing Iloilo isn’t whether to spend on flood control. It’s whether to keep spending in fragments or start building a basin.

Because the deeper issue was never just about whether funds are clean. It’s about whether they’re used coherently — and incoherence in infrastructure is its own kind of waste. The public pays for it either way, just slower and less visibly.

If Iloilo actually pulls this off — a basin-wide system integrating flood attenuation, storage, and water security into one design — it won’t just reduce risk. It’ll show that reform can start not with investigations, but with better engineering, better coordination, and better stewardship of public money.

That might end up being the most durable safeguard of all.