A footnote to the "Half Road" article

Few columns ago, I wrote on the “half road” in Barangay Paril. My subject was about a road-concreting project in that mountain barangay which, I believed, the contractor abandoned. A portion of the project, I thought, would present more danger to the traveling public because only one lane of the road was concreted. The concreted portion is so narrow that it can accommodate only my old Beetle. The other lane, the one not cemented, is almost impassable. So, I suggested to the Office of the Ombudsman (Visayas) then to take a hand in investigating it because I felt it was a case of a contractor cheating the government or worse, of the contractor and some government officials conniving in what would amount to be a case of graft and corruption.

 The day following the publication of my article, I received a telephone call from the Office of the Mayor. It was rather unexpected because since my lady Carmen, ended her term as city councilor, almost a decade ago, we did not get, (of course!), any calls from city hall, much less from the mayor.

 Indeed, it was the Honorable Cebu City Mayor, Michael L Rama, I was speaking to. He called to inform me that he immediately asked that the project site, in Barangay Paril, be visited in order to validate what I wrote about. His engineers came up with the report that the project was complete, in length, width and thickness. In fact, the half lane was a bonus. The city is not going to pay for the concreting of about 70 meters of the “half road” because it was just an addition to the contracted length. In concluding, the mayor said I might not be correctly informed.

 Firstly, for and in behalf of my neighbors in Paril, let me thank the mayor for the concrete road. While there are still stretches that remain to be maintained or better still, asphalted or concreted, those portions that have been attended to already have made our travel safer and faster. According to my neighbors, they are getting the kind of fair attention from the present mayor that the former chief executive failed to give.

 Secondly, I wish that the mayor ask further the engineers to investigate further. In the engineers’ report, they said that the length of the project is about 520 meters, excluding the extra 70 meters of “half road”. Using modern equipment, they must be accurate in their technical study.

 In my visit there however, my car’s odometer registered a much shorter distance. Definitely, it read much shorter than 500 meters. Even admitting that the engineers’ system should be failsafe, the difference was just too big. But, I have a plausible explanation that should be looked into by the city investigators.

 This project is an extension of an existing concrete road. Anyone, including an engineer, who was not physically present when this work started and just looks at the project at this stage, may not easily recognize this fact. The tip of the old road and the start of the new one seem to blend very well such that where they meet is, to my ordinary eye, difficult to distinguish. Without casting aspersion on the engineer tasked by the mayor to look into this concern, he may not realize that there is already a concrete road and so he may have included in his measurement the existing concrete road.

 Another point. The physical absence of the workers and equipment from the job site led me to conclude that the contractor already abandoned the work although the report of the engineers suggested that the project might have been already completed. I must take exception to the completeness of the contract. Anyone who may view the work will find out that many portions of the project are, for a lack of a better term, “not property shouldered”. These edges of the road pose grave peril to motorists. By this indication, we have enough reason to believe that it is not complete and should the contractor ask for full payment, it must be, as yet withheld.

So, while I must commend the honorable mayor for his quick action to a publicized report, I should also caution him to validate even further the report given him.