Government is asking the Taiwanese for $40 million in deficit financing – which means basically that government is broke. So what else is new, right? Well, the Ministry of Works today unveiled a fleet of 9 new light trucks and that’s just part of a two million dollar equipment upgrade. And where’s all this spending coming from? According to the Minister, it’s all from savings. And it’s enabling him to rebuild a Works Department which had basically been stripped of all useful equipment and all purpose.
Hon. Anthony Boots Martinez, Minister of Works
“After I became Minister of Works basically the Ministry of Works had few vehicles and majority of the equipment were sold out and we had made representations to government for us to get some new equipment or get back the basic equipment for the Ministry of Works. If you notice we have this fleet of trucks for the DTS, the District Technical Supervisors and our engineers who in many cases have been hitchhiking rides, who need to use their private vehicles from time to time.”
Cadet Henderson, CEO – Ministry of Works
“Presently our fleet is very very much aged and deteriorated. Many of the trucks don’t have four wheel drive so they can’t navigate in the rural unpaved areas and so this will significantly improve the capacity to travel the entire country.”
Jules Vasquez,
Is it the product of a competitive bidding process?
Cadet Henderson,
“Yes this is the result of at least five six months of efforts. We put together a Cabinet paper where a whole package of $2 million worth of procurement was agreed to which includes new dump trucks, reconditioned heavy equipment as well as a new line of markers for the highways and of that a fraction went into six of these pickups and another three were purchased using project funds.”
Hon. Anthony Boots Martinez,
“I believe that the Ministry of Works has the capability, has the skills to do better work than private contractors. I challenge that. We have engineers, we have soil testing, we have architecture people that drive- we have the tools, we are equipped with the tools. All we need to do, we are equipped with the people, all we need to do is to get the necessary tools to effect the changes.”
The 9 Isuzu trucks cost $390,000 or between $40,000 to $45,000 each. Soon the Ministry will be getting ten heavy trucks, one line marking machine, one loading machine and one tar truck.
