THE Philippines’ Department of Transportation (DOTr) has terminated its contract with the contractors responsible for construction work on the Unified Grand Central Station project in Manila.
According to local news outlet The Philippine Star, DOTr terminated the contract with the BF Corporation and Foresight Development and Surveying Company (BFC-FDSC) Consortium on May 16 due to “excessive construction delays” on the project.” In response, the consortium blamed the issues on delayed payments from DOTr.
The Unified Grand Central Station project is designed to provide a core interchange between Line LRT-1 of Manila’s light rail transit network, and lines MRT-3 and MRT-7 of the metro network.
The BFC-FDSC Consortium was awarded the construction contract in 2019 but was unable to meet the original delivery schedule for the project. Opening was originally forecast for 2022, then postponed to May 2023 after work stopped during the Covid-19 pandemic. In 2023, DOTr announced a further postponement, this time citing technical issues.
“Now that we have terminated the contract we can finally move on with construction,” says transportation secretary, Vince Dizon, adding that DOTr will be looking into ways of accelerating project delivery under the provisions of the Government Procurement Act and the Public-Private Partnership (PPP) Code.
Line LRT-1 runs from Fernando Poe Jr Avenue in Quezon City to Dr Santos Avenue (Sucat) in Parañaque, with interchanges with lines LRT-2 and MRT-3. Line MRT-3 runs along Epifanio de los Santos Avenue (EDSA), from North Avenue in Quezon City to Taft Avenue in Pasay. Line MRT-7, currently under construction, will run from San Jose del Monte in Bulacan to the North Triangle in Quezon City.
