Officials Cite Quote Reverse Groundbreaking Ceremony As Innovation In Municipal Project Management

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Quezon City Mayor Announces New Park That Will Be Inaugurated Before It Is Built

QUEZON CITY — Quezon City Mayor Celestino Aguilar-Buenaobra announced Tuesday that the city’s newest public park, to be called Bagong Pag-asa Park, will be formally inaugurated in a ceremony scheduled for next Saturday, despite the fact that construction of the park has not yet begun, the contractor has not yet been selected, and the site preparation has not been completed because the current occupants of the site, a family of eleven who have been living there for fourteen years, have not yet been relocated.

The mayor described the approach as “a bold new paradigm in project delivery” that he called the Reverse Groundbreaking Method, under which “the inauguration comes first, establishing the commitment and the vision, after which the construction follows naturally from the momentum that the ceremony creates.”

“In the old approach,” Mayor Aguilar-Buenaobra explained at a press conference at City Hall, “you build the thing and then you inaugurate it. This approach has a problem: by the time you inaugurate it, the news cycle has moved on and nobody comes to the ceremony. In the new approach, the ceremony comes first when everyone is excited, and the building follows once the excitement has established the political will to complete it.”

The Site Situation

The site designated for Bagong Pag-asa Park is a 2,400-square-meter parcel on Commonwealth Avenue that is currently occupied by the Dimaculangan family, who have lived there under an informal dwelling arrangement since 2010. The city has, by the family’s account, notified them of their relocation requirement through an oral communication from a barangay official and a handwritten note slipped under their door on Monday.

The relocation package offered to the Dimaculangan family, by the city’s communications office’s account, includes “appropriate transitional support to be determined.” The family has not yet received specifics. They have been informed that they need to vacate before the Saturday inauguration ceremony, which gives them four days.

Rosario Dimaculangan, the family’s matriarch, told reporters Wednesday morning that she was “confused about the sequence of events.” She noted that she had not been aware that a park was planned for her property until Monday’s notification. She also noted that there appeared to be, at present, no park on her property. She added that she had looked at the property several times on Wednesday to confirm this.

This kind of displacement timetable, in which the administrative urgency of a government ceremony takes precedence over the relocation needs of affected families, is consistent with a long pattern in Philippine urban development in which project announcements create momentum that then runs ahead of the human dimensions of the project’s implementation.

The Contractor Situation

The park’s construction contract has not yet been awarded because, the city’s procurement office confirmed, the bidding process had not yet been completed. The bidding process had not yet been completed because it had not yet been initiated. It had not yet been initiated because the project’s design had not yet been approved. The project’s design had not yet been approved because it had not yet been completed. It had not yet been completed because it had not yet been commissioned. It had not yet been commissioned because the budget allocation had not yet been finalized.

The budget allocation, the city budget office confirmed, would be finalized “in the next budget cycle.” The next budget cycle begins in August.

Mayor Aguilar-Buenaobra, asked about the contractor situation at the press conference, said the contractor selection would be “expedited following the inauguration.” He described the inauguration as “the catalyst” that would accelerate all subsequent steps.

The Inauguration Ceremony

The Saturday inauguration ceremony will, according to the invitation distributed by the mayor’s office, include: a ribbon-cutting at the site’s Commonwealth Avenue entrance; remarks from the mayor and several city officials; a symbolic tree-planting ceremony featuring seedlings that will later be replanted in the actual park once it is constructed; and what the invitation describes as “a symbolic turning of ceremonial earth representing the commencement of construction activities.”

The seedlings will, the mayor’s communications team clarified, be maintained in the mayor’s office garden until the actual park is ready to receive them. No timeline for this transfer has been provided.

This is consistent with a wider pattern of ceremonial construction activity whose relationship to actual construction activity is primarily motivational rather than operational.

The Broader Pattern

Quezon City has, in the previous administration, inaugurated fourteen projects whose construction subsequently encountered delays ranging from six months to, in two cases, indefinite postponement. The city’s records show that, of fourteen pre-construction inaugurations in the previous five years, nine projects are still in various stages of procurement. Three have been completed. Two have been quietly dropped from the city’s project list without formal announcement.

The Reverse Groundbreaking Method is, accordingly, not entirely new. It is, rather, a formalization and renaming of an existing practice. The innovation is primarily in the branding.

For more on Philippine local government project management, see The Daily Mash for related coverage of British infrastructure project sequencing.

The Dimaculangan family is looking for somewhere to go. The Saturday ceremony is confirmed. The park does not exist.

SOURCE: https://sites.google.com/view/world-satire/united-kingdom-and-satire