Squeaking wheel

I am immediately suspicious of losing bidders who raise a ruckus long after the bidding is done and try to derail delivery of urgently needed public goods. More often than not, they are driven by the Squeaking Wheel Principle: the squeaking wheel gets some oil.

The past few days, a losing bidder to the LRT-1 extension project has been beating up on the agency responsible for the project, raising a host of unrelated issues and making unfounded claims. The losing bidder has threatened to bring the LRTA to court for supposedly violating its intellectual property rights. That is a rather tenuous claim and when people merely threaten to sue rather than actually file a case, it is evident that the sole purpose of the exercise is merely acoustic.

The losing bidder in this case is F.F. Cruz/Filsystems, one of the country’s largest construction firms. Through its publicists, the company claims its design for the extension of the LRT to connect with the MRT at North Avenue has been copied by the winning bidder. This claim is being made despite the fact that the extension of the line replicates, understandably, the existing facility that runs from Monumento to Baclaran.

It turns out, the Filsystems claim is based on an earlier unsolicited bid to extend the LRT from Monumento to North Avenue (as against the other option of extending the MRT to interconnect with the Monumento terminal of the LRT). The other option was obviously less practical. It would have involved removing the monument from the crowded Monumento junction.

The unsolicited bid was submitted to the DOTC and was immediately superseded by the government’s decision to assign the priority interconnection project to the LRTA. The unsolicited bid was thus rendered moot.

At any rate, the unsolicited Filsystems bid offered a concept involving the construction of three additional stations for the LRT at Balintawak, Congressional Avenue and North Avenue to finally close the loop and benefit the commuting public. Why the MRT, in the first place, was allowed to build a line that ends at North Avenue is a prior question that needs to be asked. But that is another matter.

The company had a sketch of that concept copyrighted by the National Library. It was not a patent for some novel engineering breakthrough.

If I, for instance, drew a sketch of a pedestrian walkway from the Luneta to my house in Quezon City, I suppose the National Library would copyright that too. But that will not give me exclusive right to bid for the public works contract in the event government, in some insane moment, decided the project is worth doing.

Filsystems had, at the onset, appeared to have realized the folly of the very claim it now repeats when it participated in the bid for the project. The competitive bidding scrupulously followed every prescribed procedure and was witnessed by representatives from the World Bank, the Catholic Bishops Conference of the Philippines, concerned NGOs and the Contractors Association of the Philippines.

Filsystems lost that bid because it submitted incomplete documents. That is stupid; but it happens. Complete documentation is the indispensable rule for every competitive bidding process.

The company, in effect, admitted its mistake by trying to submit the absent documents after the bidding was done. By then it was academic. They should not assume the rules might be bent to suit them.

The world does not revolve around trying to appease them. Or buying their peace.

Since Filsystems participated in the bidding process to begin with, they should have fully understood that what was being awarded was design and execution of the project. If this company has any design issues, they should take that up with the winning bidder, not with the LRTA. The agency merely supervised the bidding and oversees the execution of the project according to engineering specifications and schedule of delivery.

In a word, Filsystems has no leg to stand on. The firm might have lost out on a technicality, but that is what bidding procedures are all about. Any firm that loses out on a technicality did not, evidently, exercise due diligence. The fault is entirely on the losing bidder’s lap.

Proper bidding procedure operates on a “pass/fail” principle. Incomplete documentation means the initial requirement for participation has not been met. This principle is essential in ensuring the integrity of the process and its participants.

Having no leg to stand on, however, is not enough reason to keep Filsystems from raising a ruckus. But it does force this firm to resort to extraneous issues and malicious claims.

For instance, the LRTA has been accused of purchasing rail cars for the Baclaran-Bacoor extension which does not yet exist. It turns out, the rail cars were purchased to increase passenger load capacity on the existing track and are all fully deployed.

The accusation is nothing more than a mean attempt to smear the agency that supervised the bid.

Questions have been raised about why the MRT and the LRT use tracks of different gauges, closing the possibility of the same trains literally running around the loop. That is a good question. But it harks back to mistakes made many years ago and does not bear on the present issue.

We could, of course, decide to close down the metropolis for a few months so that the old rails might be torn up and replaced, new rail carriages might be bought and we could all loop around our crowded city. But it is not too late to even think about that. It is much more practical for commuters to walk a few steps and change trains.

And it is also too late for the losing bidder to try and behave like a squeaking wheel.