Quezon City Mayor Joy Belmonte has raised alarm bells over what she called one of the biggest infrastructure scandals to hit the city in years — billions of pesos poured into flood control projects that, instead of solving the flooding, may have made it worse.

On Monday, Belmonte revealed that what was previously thought to be 254 flood control projects under the Department of Public Works and Highways (DPWH) turned out to be 331 projects upon inspection. The price tag: over P17 billion in taxpayer money.

“I am outraged at how these people squandered this money,” Belmonte said in a press conference. “This amount could have changed lives. So much could have been done with this money for the health and education of our people.”

The mayor said many of the projects either could not be verified, appeared to have been suspiciously duplicated, or worse, blocked the floodwaters instead of diverting them.

Questionable phases, dubious records

One of the most glaring examples, Belmonte said, was the San Juan River flood mitigation project, which was split into 92 separate phases.

“Some of these phases even shared the same coordinates,” Belmonte noted. “Based on our observation, phase 92 was recorded in 2024, while phase 66 was listed under 2025. That’s quite suspicious.”

The findings, she said, raised questions about whether the “phases” were merely a way to inflate budgets and prolong contracts without delivering real solutions.

Red flags in project data

City engineer Dale Perral, who presented the city’s inspection report, said they found 66 projects with incorrect locations, 35 with no coordinates at all, and 31 with mismatched or erroneous coordinates.

“These are based on DPWH’s own Project and Contract Management Application Web (PCMA-Web),” he said. “We even saw projects declared as ‘completed’ but were still under construction when we visited the sites.”

Perral disclosed that of the top 15 contractors linked to the projects, seven controlled a large chunk of them — a pattern that would suggest collusion or favoritism in awarding government contracts.

Marcos directive welcomed

Belmonte said she was relieved that President Ferdinand Marcos Jr. recently reinstated the rule requiring local government units (LGUs) to certify whether or not a national project was really completed and done properly.

“This measure is necessary. It prevents ghost projects from being declared finished when, in reality, they’re either substandard, delayed, or worse, non-existent,” Belmonte said.

Next steps

Belmonte said their findings will be forwarded to the Independent Commission on Infrastructure, the newly created body tasked with probing questionable infrastructure projects nationwide.

“This is about accountability,” Belmonte stressed. “We are talking about the people’s money here. Every peso wasted is an opportunity stolen from our citizens.”

For the mayor, the P17 billion wasted on flood control could have built new classrooms, expanded hospitals, and funded social services to improve the lives of Quezon City residents.

“Instead, what we got are projects that do not work, projects that have failed to protect our communities from flooding and, in some cases, have even made the situation worse,” Belmonte said.