1.1 Audit findings and opinions

1.1.1 Mechanism for the prevention of repeated excavation caused by road works within two years and its

execution

The Coordination Group was unable to confirm if recurrent road works were realized at the same location over the past two years, nor present with a decisive coordination result for its members to implement; therefore the meetings did not have any substantial results, even considerable resources were invested and the engagement of many of its members.

Also, the Civic and Municipal Affairs Bureau (hereinafter referred as “IACM” according to Portuguese abbreviation), as the main responsible department to verify the administrative procedure, had deficiencies in the approval of excavation licenses and the implementation of weekly coordination meetings. In approval aspect, lack of clear definition of “same construction site”; road works information is still incomplete even the GIS system has been operating for more than a year. Moreover, if the construction site has unfinished road work, it will not be regarded as repetitious excavation; therefore, despite the occurrence of repetitious excavation within two years, applicant could still obtain the road work permit without paying double fees. Regarding to the weekly coordination meeting, IACM would only coordinate the prospective road works commencing in the following month and, since the punitive measures granted by the law was ineffective in the relative procedure, the effects of coordination were mainly depended on the voluntary support from the public institutions. In addition, IACM said that many works fail to proceed simultaneously in Macau due to the narrow environment of its roads. Therefore, the coordinated works only save little time on re-excavation and resurfacing of roads, having limited effect.

With regard to the implementation of coordination result, IACM would not follow up whether the works had progressed according to the coordination result, and therefore the hugely resourced coordination mechanism was not able to accomplish its expected purpose.

1.1.2 Monitoring mechanism on the progress of road works and its execution

IACM is responsible for monitoring the construction progress of road works, but in reality its control on the progress is loose. Firstly, regarding to the approval of construction period, IACM neither requested all applications to provide justifications for the period, nor established standards or guidelines for the assessment of the period, therefore making it difficult to ensure that the approved period was reasonable. Besides, IACM allowed the application for permit extension to be submitted after the completion of road works, which means it gave up the control on the extension request. Moreover, although the permit extension fee is higher than the fee of the first permit, its deterrent effect is opened to question. In fact, in the 36 road work cases that exceeded the permit expiry date, CA revealed that there were 2 to 72 days delay in each case, with a total of 1019 days delay.

As regards to the calculation of exact number of construction days, IACM has no rule requiring supervisory staff to officially calculate the exact construction days for each project, and even no effective monitoring on the execution of inspection as the integrity and accuracy of IACM inspection records were in doubt, rendering it impossible to ensure that road works can be completed as soon as possible. All these demonstrated that IACM did not shorten the construction period to minimize the inconvenience to the public through the monitoring mechanism and the authority vested by the law.

Apart from the management problem mentioned above, the irregular situations of IACM that supervisory staff overstepped their superior’s authority to approving the suspension of road works, resulted in IACM’s inability to have better grasp of and solve all overdue cases. Among the 36 overdue cases, there were 11 cases in which permits were not renewed after expiration, causing the income of the SAR Government to lose 107,160 patacas.

1.2 Audit suggestions

 In the short term, through re-examining the problems in the assessment of excavation permit and the coordination meeting, a well-developed and effective mechanism should be established to minimize the influence of road works on citizens under the current objective circumstances.

 In the medium and long term, the responsible departments should review the objective circumstances of road works in Macau, through the scientific analysis to reduce the frequency of road excavation, to shorten the required construction period, and even to decrease the necessity of excavation. They can analyze the existing objective constraints from these three aspects, and study how to tackle these problems from a higher-level perspective.

 IACM should review the current procedures of assessment and supervision of road construction period, and set up an efficient mechanism for shortening the period, so as to ensure that the impact to the public will be minimized as much as possible.