Fit for 65 oversized egos

Five years ago, at the groundbreaking for the future Senate building, the senators boasted of saving P500 million from its total price tag of P8.5 billion. As of late, however, the cost has ballooned to P23 billion and the Department of Public Works and Highways (DPWH) is being blamed for it.

Since the legislators are not up to investigating their peers who may have benefited from the astronomic cost escalation — that the majestic home of the senators is located in Taguig is a dead giveaway — the DPWH must be asked to explain.

The canned response whenever the subject of the overpriced Senate castle is raised is that it was budgeted by the DPWH and not the Senate. but the standard operating procedure (SOP) for passing government money around is too well-known for the senators to wash their hands of the nearly threefold jump in the project cost.

Still, the complication in this scapegoating is that for most of the construction of the building, the DPWH head was Mark Villar who is now part of the old boys’ club.

The building is indeed palatial, with 11 stories. Sitting on a 1.8-hectare property in the Philippine Navy Village it will have enough space for at least 65 senators, just in case the move to federalism was approved before President Duterte’s six-year term ended in 2022.

It will have four towers, a three-level parking area for 1,200 cars and, to top it all, can provide spacious offices for 65 senators against the 24 allotted by the Constitution.

The alibi is that the new legislative building will be able to accommodate more senators under the federal-state setup that the possible amendments to the Constitution will require.

The senators rationalized that the majestic edifice is needed to give honor to democracy since it will be a “worthy bastion” of the dear principle.

“It is going to be an illustrious home for true servants of the people,” one of the senators commented during the start of construction.

Indeed, it would be hard to imagine not pampering the public servants since they provide frequent entertainment through their “investigations in aid of legislation.”

The juicy contract was awarded to Hilmarc’s Construction Corp., which ironically was a subject of past Senate probes on the overpriced construction of public projects although it always came out clean.

Hilmarc’s officials were nearly held in contempt by the senators in 2014 for their refusal to cooperate with the troika of Senators Alan Peter Cayetano, Antonio Trillanes and Koko Pimentel in the year-long demolition job on former Vice President Jojo Binay prior to the 2022 polls.

During the groundbreaking ceremony for the new legislative structure, all the animosity between the senators and the contractor was in the past.

One senator even commented that Hilmarc’s was seeking to redeem itself from the allegations of irregularities when it undertook the contract.

With the spike in the cost of the project, the builder made a good recovery in terms of making the legislators happy.

Senate President Chiz Escudero vowed a probe, which only brings up more questions about the silence before he assumed the top Senate post since the cost of the project and the adjustments were not a secret to the senators.

And why Taguig City as the site for the building? Antipolo City offered 25 hectares of land for free to host the Senate building.

Antipolo also provided a faster four-year timeline to finish the building, ready for occupancy; or six months for the design development phase, one year for land development, and two-and-a-half years for the construction phase.

Somebody had described the Senate as the home of 24 separate kingdoms, referring to the senators.

Now they have their citadel worthy of their overflowing chutzpah.