Alcera dares rivals to debate on MRT station row

Pasay City mayoralty candidate Vice Mayor Greg Alcera challenged yesterday his political rivals to a debate on the controversial ground-level construction of the Metro Rail Transit (MRT)-3 line in the city.

"Anytime and anywhere, I am ready to face them in a public debate," the vice mayor, said in a press statement.

Alcera issued the challenge after receiving information that Mayor Wenceslao "Peewee" Trinidad had been blaming him and city councilors for the alleged illegal construction of the mass rail transit system.

Trinidad, for his part, said he would not run from Alcera’s challenge.

"He really has a lot of explaining to do. I understand his need for the debate. It was during their time when the ground-level construction of the MRT started. They are the ones who are now facing the displeasure of the city’s voters," Trinidad said.

The MRT construction has become a major campaign issue in the Pasay elections after thousands of residents, particularly those from the vote-rich barangays of Malibay and Tramo blamed city officials for their failure to prevent the ground-level construction.

It was learned that the original plan for the construction of the MRT tracks from Magallanes to Pasay-Rotunda (the EDSA and Taft Avenue intersection) was for an elevated construction so as not to close off the EDSA-Malibay and EDSA-Tramo intersections to vehicular and pedestrian traffic.

The elevated construction, however, reportedly cost some hundreds of millions of pesos more than the ground level construction and was junked by the MRT consortium of companies that built the mass transit system.

The subsequent ground level construction has resulted in daily traffic snarls in the two intersections and the isolation of the two barangays.

Alcera has maintained that the city council, of which he is the presiding officer as vice mayor, had not enacted on any resolution granting approval to the MRT construction.

Alcera pointed out that he and seven councilors had filed last month an "abatement of public nuisance" suit in the city regional trial court against MRTC officials, and the secretaries of the departments of public works and highways, and transportation and communications.

Trinidad had earlier dismissed the suit as useless, pointing out that the construction of the rails was already finished and there was nothing for the court to stop.

"They filed the complaint to gain media mileage and show that they are fighting the MRT construction. If they were really against the MRT construction, then they would have done better if they filed the suit in 1998 when the construction started in Magallanes," Trinidad of the Laban ng Demokratikong Pilipino, said.

A former police captain and bodyguard of the late Mayor Pablo Cuneta, Ricardo "Ding" Santos, is also vying for the mayoralty under the PDP-Laban party. – Rainier Allan Ronda