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ON CPA CONCESSION PROCESS
‘Better to delay project than sign unconstitutional bill’
Responding to concerns that his veto delayed a major request-for-proposal process for port concessions, Gov. Ralph DLG Torres said he supported a bill he vetoed Monday that would have allowed the Commonwealth Ports Authority to offer concessions to different bidders at different ports and allow them to negotiate with existing concessionaries without conducting a public search for a new one, but reiterated the “very unconstitutional parts of the bill.”
“It’s better to delay the project that sign something that I know is not only unconstitutional now but I am 100 percent sure will be contested from the way it’s done,” Torres told reporters yesterday.
Torres, when pressed, agreed that the bill was drafted in communication with CPA and the attorney general’s office but said, “what came out is an unconstitutional bill.”
He said this was “advised by the AG,” or Attorney General Edward Manibusan. “And we got to stick to that.”
The governor, in his veto message on Monday, said the bill—House Bill 19-123—would limit future legislatures from amending the business gross revenue tax and business license fee the bill’s proposed provisions, even as implicit in the lawmaking power of a legislature is the principle that one legislature cannot enact law that prevents future legislatures from exercising its lawmaking power.
“A statute may not be enacted that irrevocably binds successor legislatures,” Torres wrote. He was flagging a provision, among others, that would have assessed a tax of 4 percent on gross sales and bind this tax from being increased during the term of the concession agreement.
