The director of the Center of the Secretariat of Infrastructure, Communications and Transport (SICT), Imelda Guerra, accepted that the agency has failed to maintain the roads under its charge, because to date the Secretariat of Finance and Public Credit (SHCP) has not released the 420 million pesos budgeted for this year.
“We are falling short on the maintenance that the roads need,” explained the federal official, while acknowledging that the stretches of road cannot remain in their current condition.
He said he hopes that, despite the change in federal administration, the street visits planned for this year can be met, even though there are only four months left until the end of the fiscal year.
He stressed that there were some works to improve the conditions of the roads, such as 50 kilometers of resurfacing on the road from Cuauhtémoc to the state border, while on the short route to Parral they attended to 40 kilometers and sections of the Sueco to Villa Ahumada road. Currently there are works on the road to Baseaseachic and patching on the Juárez-Janos highway.
However, he added, it was not enough and addressing asphalt wear is the main pending issue left for the federal authority.
“We are aware that we are falling short, that our state’s roads do not require the maintenance they need, that is our main issue. We are aware that we are falling short,” he said.
He explained that the reason why the resources allocated for maintenance that were planned for 2024 had not yet been released was because the Treasury Department had other priorities in mind.
However, he said that these 420 million pesos can still be delivered to be applied this year and not have to wait until 2025.
“We are still in talks with the central offices to release them and be able to invest in the pending sections,” he said.
The pending resource would be used to make repairs on several sections in the state, mainly on the Chihuahua to Juárez and Chihuahua to Delicias highways.
Since February the appeal was stopped
At the end of February, July
Mercado Rodríguez, president of the Mexican Chamber of the Construction Industry (CMIC), revealed that the SICT cancelled 23 tenders for routine maintenance and 12 for periodic maintenance of road sections for around 400 million pesos.
This, after the SHCP reserved 11 billion pesos for the National Highway Conservation Program, at the request of the National Defense Secretariat (Sedena), which will now be in charge of said tasks.
In that same month of February, before the builders, the SICT delegate declared that she was waiting for the Ministry of Finance to release the resources assigned in the Expenditure Budget for road maintenance.
He explained that, of the 11 billion pesos of the National Highway Conservation Program 2024 that was suspended, the investment scheduled for Chihuahua amounted to 420 million pesos for the maintenance of 2,625 kilometers of federal highways.
However, according to data from the State Secretariat of Communications and Public Works (SICT), the federal network would require at least nine billion pesos to address 15 federal highway sections that are most severely worn and which total 1,500 kilometers.
Julio Mercado himself stated that there are federal sections of the highway to Ciudad Juárez where milling and resurfacing work has not been carried out for 10 years, which has led to significant deterioration.
He explained that sealing irrigation should be carried out every two or three years, while milling and resurfacing every four or five years, but in the case of the state’s federal highway network, work of this type is rare.
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