The Sinking Standard

If you drive through Pavia, Iloilo, it’s like looking at a monument to bureaucratic inertia.

The Ungka and Aganan flyovers were supposed to be the pride of Western Visayas, cutting travel time to the airport and easing the daily grind. Instead, they became a national punchline – structures that literally sank because someone, somewhere, didn’t get the soil depth right.

But the real story is not the sinking concrete or delayed works. It’s the fact that the firm responsible for these designs, United Technologies Consolidated Partnership (UTCP), is still winning.

Since 2010, UTCP has secured roughly 50 contracts worth PHP 1.6 billion. Even after the Iloilo fiasco came to light in 2022, they managed to bag eight more government contracts worth PHP 83 million. In any other industry, if you design a product that fails within two weeks—as the PHP 680 million Ungka Flyover did—you don’t get a promotion. You get a lawsuit and a permanent exit from the market.

In the world of government procurement, however, UTCP seems to be “too embedded to fail.”

The cost of this “failing upward” is being footed by the taxpayers. We are currently paying a double tax: first for the original flawed design, and second for the “costly fixes.” To get the Aganan Flyover back on track, the DPWH had to allocate an additional PHP 229 million for jet grouting and stabilization. That is money that could have paved dozens of farm-to-market roads or upgraded regional hospitals. Instead, it is being poured into the ground to fix an error that should have been caught during the initial soil investigation.

The stakes have also shifted from economic waste to public safety. This is more than just traffic delays anymore. In February 2025, the PHP 1.225 billion Cabagan–Santa Maria Bridge in Isabela partially collapsed. While there is a debate over overloading, President Marcos Jr. himself pointed to a “design flaw.” UTCP led the structural design. When bridges start falling and injuring people, “investigation pending” is no longer an acceptable status quo.

So, how do we break the cycle?

First, we need to close the loopholes in Republic Act No. 9184 (the Government Procurement Reform Act). Currently, “past performance” doesn’t seem to carry enough weight to disqualify a consultant if they are the lowest bidder or have the right technical score on paper. We need a centralized, transparent “performance blacklist” that is strictly enforced across all DPWH regional offices. If a firm’s design leads to a structural failure, it should be barred from bidding for at least five years, period.

While we do recognize that the government has institutionalized procurement blacklisting via Rep. Act No. 12009 (New Government Procurement Act), which revises the older R.A. No. 9184, how it strays from the old norm into better reform is yet to be seen.

Governor Arthur Defensor Jr. was right: it’s not “high time” to blacklist these firms; they should have been gone years ago. We have to stop letting the designers off the hook. Accountability is a hollow word unless the people who actually drafted these failures are hit where it hurts—with legal charges and the bill for the repairs.

As we look toward the completion of the Aganan repairs in late 2026, we have to ask ourselves: are we building for progress, or are we just funding the next repair job?