This year, a Marcos-era icon will fall—the Folk Arts Theater (FAT), or the Tanghalang Francisco Balagtas.
The building, named after the premier Filipino poet, will be replaced with a New Performing Arts Theater, which is a two-story medium-sized theater. It will have a 1,000-seating capacity.
The demolition of the FAT is only one of the components in the redevelopment of the Cultural Center of the Philippines (CCP) complex estimated to cost anywhere between P40 billion and P50 billion.
In an interview with the BusinessMirror, CCP Vice President for Administration and Finance Rodolfo G. del Rosario said the project will be undertaken as a joint venture and that the CCP is now looking for private-sector companies to partner with.
Under the JV arrangement, the company that will win the bidding for the redevelopment project of the CCP Complex will be given a 50-year concession. In exchange for this concession, the private-sector firm will share a still-to-be-determined portion of its earnings with the CCP.
In time, the CCP can redevelop its land and earn from the proceeds, particularly where commercial establishments will be placed.
“We are thinking of asking up-front money from the developer and maybe yearly revenue. That will be the steady source of income for CCP and eventually we were hoping that we would be financially capable of subsidizing ourselves, without asking funding from the government. That’s the intention of CCP’s Asset Development Program,” Del Rosario said.
The redevelopment of CCP has been on the table for many years but it took a while because of the case against Republic Real Estate Corporation (RREC) which was finally resolved by the Court of Appeals in 2009.
The appellate court ruled in favor of CCP by stopping the Pasay City government and RREC from selling the lots within the CCP Complex over the government’s alleged failure to pay the reclamation costs made by RREC.
While the CCP won the case, Del Rosario admitted that the case became a major hindrance to the redevelopment of the complex since investors shied away from giving the project a second look given the pending case at the time.
Moving forward, the plan is to look for a single company to develop around 46 hectares of land. This is the ideal situation for CCP given that it only needs to talk to a single company and the design of the complex will be consistent. But if this is not possible, the CCP is willing to break down the development of the complex into clusters.
Whatever the outcome will be, these efforts are being undertaken to improve the complex and work toward the development of CCP into a venue similar to Esplanade in Singapore and the Sydney Opera House in Australia.
“We want to unburden the government, sooner or later, we want to unburden them. We just want to free CCP from asking too much from the government,” Del Rosario said.
Image credits: Ramon F. Velasquez/Wikimedia Commons CC by SA 3.0