The Terminal Is Rising in a Drained Fishpond. The Access Road Question Comes Later.
San Miguel's airport in Bulakan is still under construction, with the first runway targeted for 2028. The fisherfolk who lost Taliptip's fishponds are already gone.
The New Manila International Airport in Bulakan, Bulacan is still a construction site. At San Miguel Corp.'s June 2026 annual stockholders' meeting, chairman and CEO Ramon Ang said the first runway remains on track for 2028, possibly earlier, while the passenger terminal and logistics center may be delayed. No one is flying out of anything yet.
The pattern worth naming early is about sequence. A private operator moves fast on the parts that carry its own revenue. The public infrastructure that feeds a project, the roads and links a commuter uses without paying a toll, tends to follow later and slower, and how it lands depends on who is writing the budget.
Who builds, who owns
The airport belongs to San Miguel Aerocity Inc., a wholly-owned subsidiary of San Miguel Holdings Corp. SMC signed the concession agreement with the DOTr in September 2019, and the legislative franchise came through Republic Act 11506, a 50-year franchise that took effect January 15, 2021. The structure means the conglomerate builds and runs the airport for decades before it reverts to full Philippine government ownership.
That concession logic shapes what gets prioritized. The expressway and interchange links feeding the complex tie into a tollway business, so every access route near the terminal carries a revenue question. The vehicle that can pay a toll gets a road built for it. The commuter, the airport worker on minimum wage, the provincial bus, needs the public counterpart routes, and those live or die on the national budget rather than on any operator's balance sheet.
The fishponds that came first
Before any terminal could rise, the land had to be cleared. The Taliptip site in Bulakan consisted largely of fishponds, and the people displaced were coastal fisherfolk. The fisherfolk group Pamalakaya reported that around 700 fishing families across seven sitios of Barangay Taliptip faced displacement.
Land acquisition here ran through Silvertides Holdings Corporation, which acquired the fishponds for the development, a private purchase route rather than the government expropriation channel most people associate with big infrastructure. Republic Act 10752, the 2016 Right-of-Way Act, governs how the national government acquires land for its own projects through negotiated sale and, failing that, expropriation with prompt payment of just compensation. Displaced-community advocates have long flagged the familiar gap wherever land changes hands for a megaproject: valuations that trail real worth, payments that arrive late, and relocation terms that read better on paper than in the barangay.
Where the public money sits
The airport draws its own line items in the national budget, and the 2026 General Appropriations Act carries funding for facilities across the country's airport system through the DOTr and CAAP. What the public record does not yet confirm is a dedicated, well-funded government access road built to the same clock as the private terminal and its toll links.
A concession agreement is not a promise kept to the public. The operator delivers what its contract rewards, and the contract rewards runways, terminals, and toll roads, not the equalizing route that would carry the arriving OFW who cannot afford one more fee.
So here is the concrete outcome to watch as the terminal goes up. San Miguel's revenue infrastructure will move on its own timeline because the money answers to lenders. The free public road that ordinary Bulakenyos will actually need is a question for future budget seasons. And the fisherfolk who gave up Taliptip's ponds for all of it are already counting whether the settlement matched the water they lost.
