MMDA drowning in excuses, yet flooded with LGU money

Floodwaters and garbage flood Metro Manila at the same time every rainy season. The same officials show up on TV every rainy season, knee-deep in both, promising that this time is different. And each time the public is asked to accept vague reassurances instead of a proper accounting of where the money went. This year, that pattern finally opened in public, not because MMDA opted for transparency but because the President and his own Cabinet secretary denied its story within 48 hours.

Here’s the timeline: “There was a big improvement in the flood situation in the metro,” MMDA Chairman Don Artes told reporters on August 11, crediting Oplan Kontra Baha, 73 “operational” pumping stations, and newly acquired mobile pumps that can drain an Olympic-sized pool in 30 minutes. Days later, President Marcos declared the garbage situation “critical” while standing in Las Piñas. A day after that, Public Works Secretary Vince Dizon declared it a “crisis” while standing in Baclaran, using a word no Cabinet official had uttered before. By the time cleanup crews finished counting, MMDA itself had hauled out 749 metric tons of waste—203 truckloads—from just one channel in front of Baclaran Church, only to see it begin refilling almost overnight.

Either the flood and garbage management system is making real, measurable progress, or the President and his Public Works Secretary are wading personally into a crisis that MMDA failed to prevent and is still struggling to explain. MMDA GM Nicolas Torre III, admitted that its trash trap “broke off” and that the garbage might have come from “outside Metro Manila.” The MMDA will now ask the help of the DENR and the National Solid Waste Management Commission to find out where the 750 tons of trash really originated. What about that? An agency still investigating the source of its own crisis?

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Look at the pattern in all the official explanations given so far: the garbage came from Manila Bay; it was pushed by tide, wind and waves; it came from outside the city; the trap simply failed; the flooding in Las Piñas was caused by roads that narrowed a river. For decades, MMDA has been tasked to handle solid waste management and waterway maintenance in all 17 cities and municipalities of the National Capital Region. If tides predictably push debris down this specific channel every rainy season, why did the one engineered barrier built for that situation go “unnoticed” until 500-plus tons had accumulated? Why did the public only hear about it when PBBM stood in it, not from a routine maintenance report months before, when the problem could have been managed instead of photographed.

Earlier on June 7, the World Bank asked the DPWH, DENR and MMDA to finish the long-delayed Metro Manila Flood Management Project because financing for the project will expire in November. The $369.88 M (P22.1B) loan was approved in 2017 by the World Bank and Beijing-backed AIIB. The project aims to protect some 1.7 million Filipinos living near 56 critical drainage areas encompassing more than 11,000 hectares of flood-prone land in Metro Manila. But years of implementation delays due to procurement bottlenecks, contractor problems, permitting requirements, resettlement issues, project design revisions, Covid-19 restrictions and frequent leadership changes has decapitated its effectivity.

But another issue that ultimately matter is a money issue MMDA never answered. This Agency is funded by billions of pesos remitted every year by the same 17 LGUs who are now watching their own esteros fill up with garbage on live television. Single cities, city officials report, contribute more than a billion pesos a year. Repeat that throughout the region, year after year, and the money that goes into MMDA for those very systems now failing in public reaches tens of billions of pesos.

And what do the mayors who fund MMDA get for that money? According to several independent sources, a one-page summary. Not a list of projects. Not a breakdown of budget versus actual. No breakdown of how much went to garbage collection vs flood control vs equipment vs people. No accounting of what the city’s effort built or tore down or dredged or repaired. For several mayors, getting even that one page is a struggle — “pahirapan pang hingin,” said one official. This is not some enraged local government airing a private grievance. This is something that occurs repeatedly in all cities: money is sent in, a one-page summary is sent back, there is no itemization, no consultation, no seat at the table on how their own money is spent.

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This is the real scandal that lies quietly beneath the garbage and flood crises that are making headlines today. It is not just that Baclaran’s estero was clogged with 750 tons of trash. It is that MMDA, the agency responsible for preventing exactly that crises, is collecting billions of pesos annually from city governments for years, with no working system of disclosure on any of that money were bought, built, maintained or achieved. The LGUs that fund the MMDA are blind on whether that spending — inside their own boundaries — makes sense, duplicates existing local projects or addresses the actual points of failure they already know about from their own constituents.

And to add insult to injury, mayors say there’s no consultation prior to the MMDA’s implementation of projects within their own territories – no coordination meeting, no joint planning, no advance notice before the agency chooses where to build a pumping station, where to prioritize desilting operations, or where to conduct a cleanup drive. San Juan Mayor Francis Zamora, chair of the Metro Manila Council, publicly called for a unified, region-wide drainage master plan that would be crafted with input from the LGUs — a diplomatic way of saying that no such coordination exists. Local officials are closest to their own chronic flood spots, and their own garbage bottlenecks. It does not have to consult the people who really know where the water gathers and where the garbage piles up. Before and until today, MMDA excludes them from planning decisions and where it is allocating their billions of pesos.

Chairman Artes’ own numbers further undercut his “improvement” narrative. DPWH was formally asked by MMDA to repair the fourteen booster pumps in Las Piñas that were not working .They had to “borrow” 10,000 workers from the DOLE’s emergency employment program, TUPAD, just to do the creek and drainage cleanup that should have been routine, funded maintenance under MMDA’s own mandate.

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In the same week, too, Secretary Dizon himself describes something far removed from Artes’s tidy progress narrative: “projects that were not built properly” for “decades,” which require a slow, project-by-project, LGU-by-LGU fix with “no overnight solution.” That is not evidence of improvement, that is an admission of systemic failure long term.

There is no need for a new legislation or a new agency. The MMDA has had the authority for decades and still does. What is missing is transparency. A one-page summary and a press conference announcing “big improvement” the same week Baclaran choked on 750 tons of trash are not appropriate.

Instead, MMDA should be required to publicly and city-by-city disclose exactly what each LGU contributed, exactly what was spent in that jurisdiction, on which specific projects, with which contractors, on what timeline, and with what measurable results. The disclosure should also be accompanied by mandatory documented consultation with mayors prior to the implementation of any MMDA project within their territory, plus an independent audit, not just an internal MMDA summary, of several years of LGU remittances versus actual delivery.

Metro Manila mayors shouldn’t have to wait for a presidential inspection to see what their remittances paid for. They should not be satisfied with a one-page summary as the final word on a billion-peso annual contribution.” All the photo-ops of dredging, all the truckloads pulled out of a choked Parañaque channel are band-aids until MMDA releases publicly the ledger instead of a press release. Until then, “big improvement” is just the story the MMDA wants to tell, while the agency’s LGU funders will be reading about the fate of their money in the newspaper, standing in the same floodwater as everyone else.

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Clean-up of “Ghost riders” a must before motorcycle taxi reform

Everyone has an opinion on how many motorcycle taxi riders we all need. Platforms want more. Riders want enough bookings to survive. Commuters just want a ride. But none of that debate means anything if we don’t know a far more basic fact: how many legitimate riders are on the road right now?

That question just got answered in the worst possible way. During a government cash assistance program, the number of motorcycle taxi beneficiaries seeking aid did not match rider allocations officially accredited to a platform. The DSWD says strict validation stopped ₱2.7 billion in public funds from going to duplicate names and so-called “ghost riders.” Read that number again. Billions of pesos, almost funneled to riders who may not even exist as claimed.

If verification can catch fraud at that scale, then knowing exactly who is riding for these platforms is not red tape. It is the bare minimum of running a public transport system.

Who are the real riders? Which platforms are they accredited with? Are they within approved allocations, or were they onboarded beyond what was authorized? Right now, nobody outside the platforms themselves seems to have a straight answer. That is not a data gap.

However, we must prevent a purge of ordinary riders who did nothing wrong. An ordinary rider who saw an onboarding announcement, submitted his documents, passed training, and started accepting bookings has no way of knowing if he’s rider number 6,001 or 100,001 against a government allocation, he never saw. He doesn’t see what his platform submitted to LTFRB. He does not decide how many riders get recruited alongside him. If a platform onboarded past its authorized limit, that is a decision made in a corporate office — not a crime committed by the man on the motorcycle. Punishing him for a company’s non-compliance is not accountability. It is scapegoating.

Who knew the official allocation? Who chose to exceed it anyway? Who kept recruiting after the ceiling was hit? Those are the names that belong under scrutiny — not the rider whose motorcycle loan and family income are very real, whatever number he was assigned.

DOTr and LTFRB’s registration and verification drive is not just bureaucracy. You cannot debate whether allocations should rise, fall, or be redistributed, whether some areas are oversupplied while others go unserved, or what fare structure is fair, until you know the actual, verified size of the legitimate rider pool. Right now, that number does not exist in any credible form — and a ₱2.7 billion near-miss just proved why that must change immediately.

Clean the data. Fix the accountability. Protect the riders who did nothing wrong. Then, and only then, let’s argue about how big this industry should be.