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Sunday, January 29, 2017
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BACOLOD City – The Bacolod-Silay Airport is among the five key regional airports in the country that are up for a P20-billion upgrading.
“I am happy that this development will finally push through. If you can recall, among the first things I did when I became the senior vice chairman of the Committee on Transportation in the Lower House was to lobby for the upgrading of the Bacolod-Silay Airport,” Leonardia said, referring to his congressional term from July 2013 to June 2016.
He wrote the then Department of Transportation and Communication and personally followed it up with then Secretary Joseph Emilio Abaya.
Leonardia proposed the expansion of the terminal and the extension of the runway.
Leonardia said he again wrote Abaya on Sept. 22, 2013 reiterating his request for a study group that will seriously look into the following:
* extension of the existing runway of the Bacolod-Silay Airport by 500 meters (1,600 feet) to allow for big-bodied planes flying international destinations to land here; and
* expansion of the existing terminal in the said airport, which now gets congested especially when the four airlines that use it have flights similarly timed.
At present, the airport terminal is about 9,000 square meters, while its runway is 45 meters (148 feet) wide and 2,002 meters (6,568 feet) long.
Leonardia said the study group they commissioned in 2013 revealed that the airport terminal needed immediate expansion.
Its present size must be doubled, he said.
“The airport terminal was programmed to accommodate 800,000 visitors a year. But in the first year of its operations in 2008, it had accommodated 880,000 passengers. Meaning, even just in the first year, it already exceeded its projection,” he stressed.
With reports that almost two million passengers now use the Bacolod-Silay Airport a year, there is more immediate concern to expand the terminal,” Leonardia stressed.
Meanwhile, Leonardia said “the matter of extending the runway will depend on traffic demand; it may come earlier, it may come later.”
“I hope that the bidding for the PPP (Public-Private Partnership) project of the Bacolod-Silay Airport finally pushes through. That will make it more ready for international flights,” Leonardia added.
The proposed PPP venture, which includes operations, maintenance and upgrading of five unbundled regional airports, were previously rolled out during the previous administration.
But it failed to bid out the projects, which were then bundled in two packages. The present administration decided to unbundle the PPP projects and bid these out individually.
Moreover, Leonardia stressed that the P20-billion upgrading could not be finished in a year’s time; it is going to be implemented in 20 to 30 years.
For his part, City Administrator John Orola, who was also former congressman and former tourism attaché, said the upgrading of the Bacolod-Silay Airport would be a big boost to our tourism industry./PN
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