DENR: There are many other illegal structures

I was at the Marlin Beach Resort last May 8 with my family. When the report came out that the Department of Environment and Natural Resources (DENR) had implemented a court order by Judge Marilyn Yap to free the beachline of obstructions, I know exactly what they removed on that beach. It was a concrete wall built by the resort owners to keep the seas away from the resort. I knew about this problem a long time ago when my good friend, Environmentalist Antonio “Onyot” Oposa told me about it.

But let me warn the DENR not to rest on their laurels just because they won this round and got applauded for it. Their work is cut out for them. A case in point are the structures that have been built along the Mahiga Creek, which shouldn’t have been allowed in the first place. At the back of the Cebu Country Club’s hole no.13 is a concrete house that is well within where the river should be. So why can’t the DENR come up with a similar court order to remove these structures that clog our creeks?

Still on beach structures, I do recall that Cebu Governor Vicente “Tingting” dela Serna targeted the beaches in Mactan, so that the citizenry can roam the beaches freely. But then, this wasn’t exactly the whole truth because in reality, there were only a few areas in Mactan that had white sand beaches. The resorts that invested in Mactan had to create their own beaches, which the ordinary folk never saw before. The DENR ought to look and carefully study this; after all, it’s their job and their duty to prevent the construction of those illegal structures, something that they did not prevent.

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I can’t understand what really is wrong with Vice-Gov. Greg Sanchez Jr. Now that he has been reelected, instead of finding ways to come up with a better plan for the Province of Cebu, he is accusing the Provincial Engineers of alleged substandard asphalting in some municipalities. Doesn’t he know that any substandard infrastructure work can immediately be seen when the work is done? Because of his accusations, he is now asking the Commission on Audit (CoA) and the Office of the Ombudsman to look into this. Greg Sanchez is merely going on a fishing expedition. He wants to bring the CoA and the Ombudsman to go fishing with him.

Perhaps a bigger question to ask is, why didn’t Vice-Gov. Greg Sanchez use this issue during the election campaign? I reckon that it is only now that he saw the poor state of the roads. What Greg didn’t know is that, some of these roads were already washed out during the rainy months last year… so if you ask me, even the most trained engineering specialist might find it difficult to find out at what point can the substandard work be seen?

I have always said that it is about time our government stop using asphalt simply because Cebu has one of the world’s best cement factories. Cement lasts longer especially that we are located in the tropics where there are only two kinds of weather, rainy and hot. Half of the year, we are drenched in rain. Even the best asphalted roads are no match to the torrential rain that visit us every year.

A case in point is Freedom St. that connects the Villalon Road to Beverly Hills. Once upon a time, this road was asphalted. Whenever it rains, the asphalt (substandard or not) gets washed away because unfortunately, the road becomes a riverbed that brings rainwater from Beverly Hills cascading down all the way to the Lahug Creek along Escario St. I know this because I have been living in the area since the 60’s when there was not a single house in our backyard. Now that this has become a community, the rain water has nowhere to go but into the street and it destroys the asphalt.

When I took over CITOM in 2001, I asked then Councilor Gabby Leyson to cement Freedom St. and he agreed that too much money has been spend on asphalting this road every year. After this road was cemented, I have never heard any complaint from the folks living there, except that the City of Cebu should now build a proper drainage in that road.

So Vice-Gov. Greg Sanchez is wasting the time of the CoA and the Office of the Ombudsman. Instead, we should turn the tables around and demand from Greg an accounting of the so-called Backbone Highway project that was placed under his office. I remember that some P50 million was spent supposedly as a feasibility study on this project but we haven’t seen a single map or document that shows that the taxpayers’ money was wisely spent. This is what the Commission on Audit and the Office of the Ombudsman should be looking into, not some washed out asphalted road destroyed by the rains.

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