Zubiri: Stop red tape on PUV modernization

Senate Majority Leader Migz Zubiri met with transport cooperatives in the Visayas on Friday to discuss the sector’s modernization efforts, particularly the challenges they are facing in securing loans from government financial institutions.

Zubiri, who chairs the Senate committee on cooperatives, was a guest at the inaugural Transport Cooperative Visayas Congress in Cebu City, organized by the National Federation of Transport Cooperatives.

“The transport sector is facing a real paradigm change, in terms of PUV modernization,” he said. “But bureaucracy is making it unnecessarily hard for them to effectively modernize,” he added.

Zubiri expressed frustration over bureaucratic red tape faced by transport cooperatives, who are made to process time-consuming documentary requirements in order to modernize. He referred particularly to the Local Public Transportation Route Plan (LPTRP) requirement of the Development Bank of the Philippines and the Land Bank of the Philippines.

The LPTRP is a study plan of PUV routes that takes months to be processed, thereby delaying loan approvals for modernized jeeps. This means transport cooperatives go for extended periods of time without vehicles to operate, and without the assurance of approval either.

“Our transport coops are willing and ready to modernize, so why are we making it hard for them? I am committed to resolving this,” Zubiri said.

“We will push to amend the rules ease up on loan requirements from our government financial institutions so they can hasten the release of funds to our applicants from the transport coop sector,” he added.

“As the author of the Ease of Doing Business Act, I want to make the modernization process as swift and easy as possible, especially since the three-year consolidation process for the PUV Modernization Program has already technically ended last April,” Zubiri said.

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Source: Latest Politics News Today (Politics.com.ph)