The amount isn’t exorbitant, but P160 million to repair and improve the Cebu International Convention Center (CICC) is still large enough for the budgets of both the Cebu provincial government and the Mandaue City government to accommodate.
Their joint decision to proceed with the rehabilitation of the CICC, once criticized as a “white elephant” with a pending graft case over allegations of overpriced materials and construction costs, is both practical and fraught with questions that need to be settled.
Like the Cebu City Medical Center (CCMC), the bulk of financing will fall again on the private sector.
The Capitol and Mandaue City Hall decided to seek private investors under a private-public partnership. It can’t use a “piso-piso” fund raising campaign like the Cebu city government as this woud wave a red flag for auditors.
How exactly they intend to go about it will be known once rehabilitation work is supposed to proceed next month.
Unlike the Cebu City Medical Center, which is supposed to house a new disaster complex based on a proposed design, the costs for the CICC are lower due to an existing structure that was damaged in the 7.2-magnitude earthquake last year.
In fact, the earthquake damage — fallen ceilings, broken cladding, etc. and not just a few surface cracks — showed to all and sundry the structure was not a sturdy one, and called to question whether mediocre materials were used and construction work were less than ideal. This was was supposed to be a world-class complex rushed in time for the Association of Southeast Asian Nations Summit in 2007.
Aside from the cost of repair, the whole rationale of having a government-run CICC that poses unnecessary competition for private operators in a landscape of a rising, modern conference venue being built by SM Seaside City should be weighed.
Before it was built, the Waterfront Hotel in Cebu City’s facility was actually called the Cebu International Convention Center, but nobody bothered to squeak about the overlap at the time.
The private consultancy firm hired to manage the CICC also has to give an accounting of whether the facility is viable as an enterprise.
We’re not even talking about Mandaue City Mayor Jonas Cortes’ earlier proposal for the CICC to be turned over to Mandaue since the land is owned by the city.
Some hard thinking has to go into the long-term value of the CICC, aside from how to make it generate revenue to sustain itself.
Looking for a private investor as a partner opens an opportunity to find someone better equipped to run the center than the local government.
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