Cancun, QR. President Andrés Manuel López Obrador announced an investment of 10 billion pesos in Cancun for infrastructure works, among which he mentioned the Nichupté Bridge and the renovation of Colosio Boulevard.
With the above, it is confirmed that the financing plan of the referred bridge has changed completely, so it will cease to be a public-private association (PPP) to become fully financed with public resources.
López Obrador announced it as a commitment of his administration to Cancun, for which he announced that he will be in Quintana Roo next week to sign the agreements that involve both works.
“Yes, we are going to improve that avenue, Colosio, which is the main one and which is in very bad condition, totally destroyed and we have already made the commitment to rebuild it and it will be, in effect, with hydraulic concrete, taking care that the drainage is also rehabilitated , water systems. It is a work that the state government and the federal government are going to do jointly, “he said.
“I am going to explain to you that a bridge will also be built to solve the road problem at the tip of the Cancun hotel zone. We are going to invest in general around 10,000 million pesos ”, the president explained in his morning conference on Monday.
The president also announced the so-called Jaguar Park in Tulum, with a donation of land by the government of Quintana Roo, in an area near the new airport that will be built in 2022 in said municipality.
“In Tulum there is also a growth that we want to order and we want to protect the area where the archaeological zone is, two archaeological zones, so that they do not invade them and that they have spaces so that they can be visited,” he added.
“There, together, it is relatively close is a Navy airport and together the state government also has land. So, we are going to turn all that area into a park of culture, of ecological recreation, no construction will be allowed, it is so that people can have their park. It’s going to be like 300 hectares, plus what the archaeological zone now has. And just like this park, we are going to have another one in Calkiní (Yucatán), with more than 2,000 hectares ”, stated the federal Executive.
Scheme change
Until before the announcement, the government of Quintana Roo had been working almost since the beginning of the Carlos Joaquín González administration on a public-private financing scheme for the Nichupté Bridge, for which they even already had an unsolicited proposal from the Controller of Infrastructure Operations, a subsidiary of ICA, since 2019, with an expected cost of 4.675 million pesos.
Even on October 14 of this year, Joaquín González declared that the Nichupté Lagoon Bridge would be made with 100% resources from the Private Initiative, after it was confirmed that the Federation’s Expenditure Budget did not include any item assigned to this project in 2022, despite the fact that at the beginning of the year the then Secretary of the Treasury, Arturo Herrera Gutiérrez, announced during a visit to Cancun that the federal government would contribute 2,000 million pesos to build the bridge through a PPP scheme.
“The Bridge of the Nichupté Lagoon of course is going to be carried out, it will be up for tender shortly, it will be a 100% Private Initiative bridge, in a public-private partnership, and it will go out to tender in the next few days, a once the Environmental Impact Statement is ready ”, Carlos Joaquín commented in October of this year.
However, almost two months later, the situation is completely different, as the governor himself declared that the bridge would no longer be financed through a PPP.
“It is an issue that we are going to present in the next visit that the president comes, it will no longer be a PPP, the bridge had very broad goals in addition to vehicle lanes, it included bicycle lanes, and many maintenance schemes during the years that the concession; but now, faced with the possibility of being a public work, they would be lost. The goals of the project will have to be reduced; Work is already underway on that, it will be a federal-state scheme, which could happen if we close it, ”said Joaquín González last week.
The state president indicated that the work projected on the Colosio Boulevard in Cancun will also enter this new public works scheme.
“We are in it to carry out investment projects, so that it can be carried out as a public work of the federal and state governments, and no longer as a PPP, which will greatly modify the scope of the bridge, particularly. It was a matter of 4,000 million, surely it would decrease to 3,000 million pesos, “he added.
Technical details
The Nichupté Bridge is conceived as an infrastructure project that proposes a 8.6-kilometer-long connection between the urban center of Cancun and the hotel zone, which will considerably reduce travel times and generalized travel costs, due to the intense traffic that it is generated in the boulevard Kukulcán.
Two years are estimated for the construction of the work and even before the change in the financing scheme it was expected to function as a collection bridge (toll), for at least 28 years, during which time, the income from the payment of the vehicle fees would remain as income of the state government through an operating agency and would be assigned to a trust for administration and payment for the correct operation of the project and its maintenance.
However, it will be next week when the new scheme under which said infrastructure will operate is announced.
Reference-www.eleconomista.com.mx