A total of 80 more modernized jeepneys will soon be plying Cebu City streets. | File photo
MANDAUE CITY, Cebu – The national government’s “Libreng Sakay” and service contracting program is expected to resume in Cebu next month.
Retired Colonel Eduardo Montealto Jr., Central Visayas director of the Land Transportation Franchising and Regulatory Board (LTFRB-7), said the program is set to resume as soon as their head office is able to complete the processing of payouts of participating operators and drivers for the months of April to June.
Montealto said the national government also needed to allocate additional funding and prepare new guidelines for its resumption here.
“Akong gi-estimate daan basin og September pa gyud ta mo-resume kay wala pa gyud mabayri nato tanan… Unya naman gud ta mo-resume og nabayran na tanan,” he said.
(Base on my estimate, we are set to resume the program’s implementation in September yet because there are still those who have not been paid. We will resume as soon as everyone gets paid.)
As of this writing, Montealto said he still does not have data as to the number of operators and drivers in Central Visayas or even in Cebu, who already collected their payouts, since these are sent directly to their respective bank accounts.
The government’s “Libreng Sakay” program was launched to especially help frontliners and other essential workers travel to their workplaces during the quarantine implementation.
But the program was temporarily suspended in July because of the need to first pay the participating operators and drivers.
In an earlier interview, Montealto said, the program’s implementation is set to resume on August 15.
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But to date, the releasing of payouts have not been completed because of the need to also go over documents that were submitted by the program participants.
READ: LTFRB-7 asks ‘a little bit of patience’ from drivers, operators of Libreng Sakay program
Montealto said that the Department of Transportation (DOTr) is now mulling to allow the LTFRB regional offices to already work on the release of the payouts during the program’s reimplementation to avoid delays.
The LTFRB-7 director said they will also be giving the 29 operators, who joined in the program’s early implementation, to decide if they wanted to again be part in its reimplementation. / dcb