TORCHLIGHT
By WENCESLAO E. MATEO, JR.
Correcting our contracting of road
maintenance
IT is a common complaint in Iloilo City that
many roads here do not last for long on their acceptable usefulness.
These roads are also poorly maintained. Some would last with
their acceptable usefulness for less than a year, with poor
maintenance not a bit helping.
Complaints include potholes, ruts and cracks
that bother both the vehicle and the passengers to no end,
with some even dubbed as abortion roads because of their being
greatly damaged without getting repaired soon enough.
The complaints point to substandard works,
which also point to corruption resulting to poor works by
contractors. It seems there is no remedy for this kind of
chronic ailment of our city roads.
Corruption or no corruption, the bottom line
is poor work and lack of penalties for such bad jobs, which
provide contractors the reason to continue being lousy with
infrastructure projects.
Insofar as the works are concerned, one big
reason for such malady must be our unflinching “loyalty”
to old schemes in contracting out road maintenance.
For this, I am sure we can learn from a recommendation
in the 21st World Congress held last October 3-9, 1999 in
Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia by Dr. Gunter J. Zietlow and Alberto
Bull.
This congress was sponsored by the International
Road Federation (IRF), the UN-Economic Commission for Latin
America and the Caribbean (ECLAC), and the Deutsche Gesellschaft
fur Technische Zusammenarbeit (GTZ) GmbH.
The two recommended a new way in contracting
out road maintenance with Performance Specified Road Maintenance
Contracts. Such a scheme, they said, are being implemented
in several Latin American countries like Colombia, Brazil,
Guatemala, Peru, Uruguay, Argentina and Chile, and lately
Australia, the United States and New Zealand.
In this scheme the Road Authority serves as
the owner, but out-sources both the management and production
of the maintenance work to a single contractor (referring,
in the Philippines, to the bid winner).
The traditional way of contracting road maintenance
is based on a schedule of unit prices and estimates of quantities.
The works to be performed are specified in the contract and
payments are based on executed measured works. By contrast,
a Performance Specified Road Maintenance Contract defines
the minimum conditions of road, bridge, and traffic assets
that have to be met by the contractor. Payments are based
on how well the contractor manages to comply with the performance
standards defined in the contract, and not on the amount of
works executed.
The nature of the contract allocates responsibility
for work selection, design and delivery solely to the contractor.
Hence, the choice and application of technology and the pursuit
of innovation in materials, processes and management is all
up to the contractor.
To define these standards is rather a challenging
task. The aim is to minimize total systems cost, including
the long-term cost of preserving the roads as well as the
cost to the road user. To avoid ambiguity, performance standards
have to be clearly defined and objectively measurable.
Typical performance standards are: the International
Roughness Index (IRI) to measure the roughness of the road
surface, which affects vehicle operating cost; the absence
of potholes and the control of cracks and rutting; the minimum
amount of friction between tires and the road surface for
safety reasons; the maximum amount of siltation or other obstruction
of the drainage system; the retroreflexivity of road signs
and markings, and the control of vegetation close to the roadway
to a specific height.
How can we make sure that the contractor complies
with the performance standards specified in the contract?
Vital to the success of this new way of contracting road maintenance
is to have appropriate control procedures as well as penalties
for non-compliance well defined in the contract documents.
Procedures defined in various contracts, as well as experiences,
vary.
In Chile, for instance, there are four kinds
of inspections: (i) monthly inspections cover 10% of the roads
under contract. Selection of stretches of 1 km each is based
on a random sample well defined in the contract; (ii) weekly
inspections looking at 5% of the roads randomly selected;
(iii) non-programmed inspections to respond to complaints
by road users; and (iv) follow-up inspections to verify that
appropriate action has been undertaken by the contractor to
rectify non compliance. Payments to the contractor are based
on the results of the monthly inspections. A percentage of
compliance is being calculated based on a formula using the
results of each individual performance standard as input data.
Full payment will only be made on 100% compliance. During
the first two years of the contract, compliance has been around
95%. Penalties are being applied if the contractor does not
rectify established deficiencies within a certain time limit./PN
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