Lawmaker Che wants inspections of the quality of Public Works

Lawmaker Che Sai Wang, affiliated with the Macao Civil Servants’ Association, is unhappy with the quality of Public Works that are directly related to tourism.

In a written inquiry to the government, to which the Times had access, Che criticized the quality of recently-built public infrastructures such as the Hong Kong-Zhuhai-Macau Bridge (HZMB) Port and the new transport hub of Barra.

According to Che, the building of the HZMB Port has many faults such as cracks, paint deterioration, and water infiltration from the roof, despite only having been constructed four years ago and being subject to relatively low usage, a situation that he finds unacceptable for vast infrastructure costing millions of patacas to build.

Another example is the Barra Transport Hub, where the asphalt did not survive the first days of use and the first instance of rain, which he claims clogged the sewage system. These examples show that there are significant problems with the quality control and supervision over government-owned construction projects that he criticized as being of “tofu quality,” with defective execution and non-standard materials used, Che claims.

For Che, not only does the bad construction jeopardize public security, it also tarnishes the image of Macau as a tourism and leisure center. He called on the government to enforce a system to control the quality and a sanctioning regime to penalize contractors for badly done work. He suggested the adoption of a point system to ensure that the contractors with a previous history of bad construction are penalized when submitting bids for other public works, to ensure their proposals are less likely to win tenders.