Thursday, December 06, 2007 11 of CH equipment can’t be used
ELEVEN of the Cebu City Government’s 31 heavy equipment units have bogged down and some have been declared to be beyond repair, as City Hall prepares to buy new ones.
But even if the defective ones will be declared unserviceable and auctioned off soon, some units can still be repaired and used, General Services Office (GSO) officials said.
GSO Chief Ester Cubero said the new equipment will improve services at the Inayawan sanitary landfill and road improvement works in the mountain barangays, especially since the defective equipment have been unusable for some time and have slowed down work.
According to their records, only two of the City’s seven bulldozers are operational at this time while four others are still being repaired. One unit has been declared to be beyond repair.
Since the bulldozers are being used at the Inayawan sanitary landfill and cannot be pulled out for other purposes, the City Council decided to buy three surplus units of bulldozers to be used for disaster response in the barangays.
One grader, two pay-loaders and two excavators, which were bought in 1994 yet, are still being repaired.
Engineer Rene Plarisan, head of GSO’s equipment repair, maintenance and management division, said they are evaluating the status of the equipment to find out if it will be more economical for the City to just declare them unserviceable and purchase new ones instead.
“We have to check what we can repair and what we can declare as junk because in some cases, the cost of the repair is too much and might not be economical for the City,” he told Sun.Star Cebu.
At the Department of Public Services (DPS), engineer Dionisio Gualiza said they have also declared some compactor and dump trucks to be unserviceable. Although they can still be repaired, the repair cost is too high, he said.
Last March, the GSO spent some P3.3 million for minor repairs of two bulldozers.
The equipment units were bought in 1994 yet and have been repaired numerous times since then.
Cubero said the cost of the series of repair of most equipment is more than the cost of acquisition.
One of the bulldozers bought in 1994 cost the City P2.25 million at that time, and the cost of repair works from 1995 to 2003 totaled P2.32 million.
A payloader bought in the same year for P1 million has an accumulated repair cost of P317,000.
The repair cost involves only the spare parts and labor costs were not provided.
Cubero said the Commission on Audit already gave a go-signal to declare unserviceable equipment that are more than 15 years old if the repair cost is already more than half of the acquisition cost.
“And most of them already exceeded half of the acquisition cost but if a brand new equipment cost P14 million and the repair will only cost P1 million, why don’t we just repair it? We will always try to repair but if the cost gets too high, then we will declare it to be unserviceable,” she said. (LCR)
