Tycoons sign pact on common rail station

SM North EDSA

Business tycoons sealed an agreement with the government Wednesday promising to resolve long-running issues surrounding the location of a railway connection station in Quezon City, with the main goal of getting it started before the end of 2016.

The agreement, which took the form of a term sheet for the Light Rail Transit Line 1, the Metro Rail Transit Line 3 and MRT-7 “unified station”, was branded by the Department of Transportation as yet another area of cooperation between the private sector and the Duterte administration.

According to the term sheet, the station would be located “in the vicinity of Edsa and North Avenue” or in between massive shopping malls controlled by the SM Group and Ayala Land Inc.

The signing, noted for its significance in bringing together a diverse set of private sector players with varying interests, was nevertheless just a first step, Transportation Secretary Arthur Tugade said.

“Signing is one thing, doing is another. I hope that later on, we can come together and agree on a date where we will actually ground break the common station,” Tugade said in a press briefing after the signing.

He said the “informal consensus” was to hold the groundbreaking before the end of this year, with completion seen in two and a half years, or by 2019.

Major issues included the final engineering design, which was a crucial aspect, especially for the Sy family’s SM Prime Holdings Inc., which sued the Aquino government in 2014 for breach of contract. This was after the DOTr moved the location of the station from the annex of SM North Edsa to an area near the Trinoma shopping mall of Ayala Land Inc.

Tugade noted that this design stage was the “game changer” element needed to settle legal issues that stalled the railway station’s construction. This was reflected in the careful manner the term sheet was worded given the temporary restraining order that SM sought and obtained in 2014 in connection with the transfer of the railway station’s location.

The facility is a key piece of infrastructure given the government’s drive to broaden the use of mass railways.

The LRT-1 and MRT-3 already serve close to a million commuters a day. That figure is expected to swell in the coming years along with the completion of the MRT-7 line to Bulacan by 2020.

The signing event Wednesday involved the DOTr, the Department of Public Works and Highways , SM Prime, Universal LRT Corp. Ltd. (backed by San Miguel Corp.), North Triangle Depot Commercial Corp. (Ayala Land) and Light Rail Manila Corp. (Ayala Corp. and Metro Pacific Investments Corp.).

Among those present during the signing were SM Prime president Hans Sy, SMC president Ramon Ang, Ayala Corp. CEO Jaime Augusto Zobel de Ayala and Metro Pacific chair Manuel V. Pangilinan. –Miguel R. Camus