Talk to each other, not the press

Iloilo City has a real water problem. The PHP 5.5 billion desalination plant rising in Brgy. Ingore is supposed to be a big part of the answer — 66.5 million liters a day, more than 400,000 residents served. We want it built on time, which is why the noise of the past week is so unhelpful.

Metro Pacific Iloilo Water went public claiming an eight-month permitting delay at the Office of the Building Official. The OBO’s records tell a different story. The formal application was filed only on March 26, 2026. Inter-office review with Zoning, the City Assessor, and the Bureau of Fire Protection wrapped up by April 21. The compliance sheet went out the next day. By May 4, MPIW still had not closed the gaps: no lease contract for the site, no Certificate of No Objection from CENRO, and incomplete architectural, plumbing, structural, electrical, mechanical, and electronics plans. That is not eight months of foot-dragging. That is a few weeks of standard review on a project the OBO classified as “highly technical.”

Mayor Raisa Treñas-Chu pushed back and her sharpest line was also the simplest: there is a Viber group. There is direct communication. Pick up the phone before going to the microphone.

This is not a small permit for a small building. It is an offshore reverse-osmosis facility being built by SUEZ, a French firm with five decades in seawater desalination, with JEMCO on the local side. Of course regulators are asking for a lease, an environmental clearance, and full plans across every discipline. Waving through a coastal industrial facility on trust is the kind of shortcut that would haunt this city the first time something went wrong.

And yet Iloilo City cannot afford complacency either. The supply shortfall sits at roughly 139 MLD, about 63 percent of demand. MPIW produces only 40 to 50 MLD. Earlier this year, around 40 percent of the city’s 180 barangays were below normal. In April 2024, the council declared a state of calamity and unlocked PHP 12,544,200 because more than 20,000 residents had little or no water. Only 27 percent of households are connected to the potable system. Even when the desalination plant runs at full capacity, MPIW Chief Operating Officer Angelo David Berba says it will cover just 60 percent of demand. Past gastroenteritis outbreaks tied to unsafe water are a reminder that this is, in the end, a public health story wearing the costume of an infrastructure story.

What now? Three things, none of them dramatic. MPIW needs to file what is missing — the lease, the CENRO certificate, the affidavit of undertaking, the complete plans — and stop briefing reporters about delays it can fix in a week. The OBO has already bent to help: separating the administrative building permit from the desalination structures, allowing the mechanical permit to follow, accepting parallel processing. That is not a slow office.

The city, for its part, should publish a public tracker for projects of this scale — dates filed, deficiencies cited, dates resolved. Sunlight ends this kind of dispute before it starts. Councilor Romel Duron’s public utilities committee at the Sangguniang Panlungsod can require it. And both sides should resist the temptation to litigate this in press releases. There is a Viber group. Use it.

Iloilo’s water future will not be won or lost in a building permit. It will be won by a concessionaire that delivers, a regulator that does not flinch, and a city government that keeps both honest — quietly, on the record, and in that order.