An Act Creating a Sub-District Engineering Office for the Special Geographic Area (SGA) to Be Known as the SGA Sub-District Engineering Office (SGA-Sdeo), Under the Maguindanao 2ND District Engineering Office, Appropriating Funds Thereof, and for Other Purposes

This creates a Special Geographic Area Sub-District Engineering Office under the Ministry of Public Works, located at Pikit and covering the 63 barangays that voted to join the region.

It assumes jurisdiction over all infrastructure and public works in the Special Geographic Area, responsible for highways, flood control, water resources development and other public works. Its functions are the ordinary engineering-office set: implementing construction and maintenance policy; inspecting, verifying, monitoring, supervising and evaluating projects against existing standards; implementing projects in its jurisdiction; assessing the condition of roads and bridges and reporting to the ministry; preparing and evaluating plans, programs of work and estimates; preparing and endorsing funding requests for infrastructure damaged by calamities; and managing and maintaining construction property, plant and equipment.

It is headed by an Assistant District Engineer. Section 6 provides for staff pending approval of the plantilla and appointments, and Section 7 addresses the transfer of construction and maintenance equipment, assets and liabilities.

The Special Geographic Area is 63 barangays that voted in 2019 to leave North Cotabato for the Bangsamoro, scattered across 6 mother municipalities. Public works in that territory were the responsibility of engineering offices in a province the barangays had voted to leave, and the region's own public works ministry had no field office there.

An engineering office at Pikit — the mother municipality contributing the largest share of the area's population — gives the region an operational arm inside the territory it is now responsible for.

This is the most practical of the measures in this registry addressed to the Special Geographic Area, and it is worth reading against the ones that are not. In December 2022 Parliament received 8 bills constituting the area's barangays as municipalities, all 8 of which became law in August 2023. This bill, filed 3 months earlier, would have given the area the engineering office that actually builds and repairs its roads — and it is still at Committee Stage.

The sequencing matters because of what municipalities need. The 8 new municipalities each carry a ₱2.5 million monthly bridging subsidy because they have no revenue base, and what they conspicuously do not have is capacity to plan or supervise infrastructure. A sub-district engineering office is the institution that supplies that, and the region created the municipalities without it.

Siting the office at Pikit is the right call on the bill's own logic and worth noting for a reason the bill does not give. Of the 6 mother municipalities contributing barangays to the area, Pikit contributes about 90,000 people — close to half the area's population — and it is also where BAA 48 created the Municipality of Ligawasan and BAA 46 the Municipality of Malidegao. Putting the engineering office where the population and the new municipalities concentrate is sensible, and it does mean the barangays taken from Aleosan and Carmen are the furthest from it.

The assets provision is the quietly important one. Equipment, plant and liabilities have to come from somewhere, and in practice that means from North Cotabato's district engineering offices. The bill contemplates the transfer and does not say how it is agreed — which is the same gap the Special Geographic Area arrangements have everywhere: the region legislates what it will take over, and the province it is taking from is not a party.