MANILA, Philippines — Pasig City Mayor Vico Sotto launched a program tapping engineering students and civil society organizations to help audit local infrastructure projects for quality and transparency.
Sotto said on Wednesday that the Citizen Monitoring of Infrastructure Projects would allow students from Rizal Technological University and CSOs to watch over both the city government and contractors handling Pasig projects.
“Our CSOs and RTU engineering students will watch over the government and the contractors in the LGU’s projects, exciting right?” he said.
Sotto said the program came after Pasig’s reforms lowered contract prices, raising a new challenge of guarding against contractors who submit very low bids but later deliver substandard or incomplete work.
“The next challenge, what if contractor-bidders dive, but their plan is actually to do substandard or insufficient work?” Sotto said.
Sotto said third-party monitoring would help ensure that infrastructure projects were not only properly priced, but also responsive to public needs and built with the right quality.
