FORMER Senate president Franklin Drilon has urged the Office of the Ombudsman to investigate alleged irregularities in flood control projects in Iloilo City amid complaints of worsening floods caused by the projects.
Drilon, in a press briefing on Tuesday, asked the Ombudsman to expedite its review of the city’s flood mitigation projects, citing what he described as questionable infrastructure and costs that are difficult to justify.
Data from the Department of Public Works and Highways-Western Visayas (DPWH-6) showed that 22 flood control projects were awarded between 2024 and 2025 for Iloilo City of the more than P2.2 billion in ongoing projects, nearly P901.4 million went to construction firms associated with the Discaya family, whose licenses were revoked amid corruption probes into their flood control contracts.
Drilon said the Ombudsman’s intervention is necessary to determine whether public funds were properly spent, noting the sudden presence of the Discaya-linked firms in the city’s infrastructure portfolio.
“I call on the Ombudsman to hasten the investigation of the flood control projects here in the city,” the Ilonggo senator said.
“I don’t know how the Discayas got into the city. They were never here before. When I was still actively promoting infrastructure projects in Iloilo, the Discayas were nowhere. Then suddenly, they appeared,” he added.
He pointed out that these contractors were not previously active in Iloilo during his years advocating for infrastructure funding for the province.
Records indicate that companies owned by the Discaya family first secured a project in the city in 2017, during the term of then-congressman Jerry Treñas.
The initial contract involved a P75-million slope protection and river improvement project along the Iloilo River, undertaken by Alpha and Omega General Contractor and Development Corp.
Alongside the push for an Ombudsman inquiry, Drilon appealed to Public Works Secretary Vince Dizon to relieve Iloilo City District Engineering Office (Icdeo) officer in charge Roy Pacanan from his post.
He cited earlier statements from Dizon that Pacanan failed to meet the Civil Service Commission’s qualification standards for district engineers. Pacanan was designated as officer in charge through a special order dated Aug. 1, 2023.
While Dizon said Pacanan is among the DPWH officials who will be relieved, Drilon said an order to that effect has not been implemented yet.
A reassignment order dated Jan. 30 showed that Pacanan has already been reassigned to the Office of the Director of the DPWH-6.
The order also noted that his relief is due to failure to meet the prescribed five years of supervisory experience as head of the Icdeo.
Integrity Chain
Meanwhile, the DPWH said it is now using the “blockchain” system to ensure proper implementation of all government infrastructure projects.
Dizon on Wednesday said the blockchain system would ensure transparency and accountability in all public works projects, including foreign-assisted ones.
He added that the move is part of the Public Works department’s commitment to ensure traceable, auditable and accessible records to accredited validators of the Blockchain Council of the Philippines (BCP).
Blockchain is a digital ledger database whose recorded contents are encrypted into a sequence of blocks and distributed throughout a network of participating computers.
The expanded transparency process, Dizon said, was in line with the directive of President Ferdinand Marcos Jr. to the DPWH to leverage digitalization and strengthen private organization oversight to verify and monitor all projects.
“From the budget process to the procurement process, to the award of the contract, to the implementation of the project, to the monitoring of the project, to the payments made to the contractors, to the acceptance of the project. Everyone should be watching now, everyone,” he added.
“By placing our projects on the Integrity Chain, we welcome the scrutiny of the private sector, academe and civil society. This is DPWH’s strong response to the president’s directive to ensure transparency and accountability is enforced for its projects,” said Dizon.
“This is a major step in ensuring that what we’ve seen in the past doesn’t happen again. And this is what the president keeps on repeating. Not only do we need to hold people to account, not only do we need to get the people’s money back, but even more important is we make sure that this [flood control scandal] does not happen again,” the Public Works chief stressed.
The Integrity Chain aims to transform infrastructure governance by offering a real-time public dashboard that tracks project spending and progress, enabling citizen feedback and anomaly reporting, and providing tamper-proof records to deter corruption.
An initiative with partners BCP, the Department of Information and Communications Technology, and BYC Ventures, the Integrity Chain provides validators real-time dashboard for decentralized and secure monitoring of infrastructure projects.
