River widening is a Herculean task
First of all, kudos to Cebu City and Mandaue City officials for the demolition of illegally constructed structures at Sitio Mahayag right along the banks of the Subangdaku river. These structures have contributed to the constricting of the Subangdaku river. Two weeks ago, during a meeting with Mega Cebu, Cebu's political leadership were given a power point presentation by Engr. Fortunato Sanchez when he compared the Surabaya City, the second largest city in Indonesia to Metro Cebu through a Google earth map.
There you can really see that the City of Surabaya was able to maintain the original width of their rivers, which flow uniformly from end to end, while in the case of Metro Cebu, notably the Subangdaku river, Lahug creek, Mahiga creeks and Guadalupe rivers, it clearly shows how wide it is from the mouth of the river along the sea, but a few meters later from a width of 50 meters, it constricts to a mere five meters. Thanks to illegal settlers who arrogated unto themselves those three-meter easement to build their shanties, which is the very reason why Cebu gets flooded when the rain comes.
Mind you, restoring our creeks and rivers to its original width is a Herculean task, which in my book should cross political boundaries. There is no doubt that this happened to Cebu because our present political system where anyone can vote has only emboldened those squatters to take over lands or properties which is supposed to be beyond the commerce of man.
Worse of all, in this era of climate change, when ordinary rain brings about a huge volume of water, the first victims are those very people living perilously close to the riverbanks and the Local Government Units have to use public money from people's tax to rescue and house those people. So consequently, it is far better to use that same tax money to remove those illegal settlers and transfer them far from the danger zones.
One solution to solve this problem is not to allow those people to vote so that our politicians, who have no political will, would not be scared anymore to have these illegal settlers removed and transferred to safer ground. But then this is the problem of our current political system, where even the illiterate can vote. This is why most reformists are asking that the Commission on Elections comes up with a minimum voting requirement up to high school graduates. Now whether this would solve this problem, we all just have to find out.
At this point, we can only hope and pray that the restoration of the original width of our creeks and rivers would happen in our lifetime. In the meantime, we should ask the Cebu City Council and Mandaue City Councils to come up with phases on this creek or river widening program with doable timetables so that we can help them monitor these projects.
Finally, both City Councils should come up with a joint River or Creek Monitoring Teams that would henceforth work on preventing future squatters from taking over what was already vacated by the present crop of illegal settlers. With this, we support the City of Cebu and City of Mandaue on their efforts to solve this problem which we should have done yesterday.
Lastly on the issue of the Cebu City Abattoir, which unfortunately was placed on land belonging to the City of Mandaue, I propose that the City of Cebu and Mandaue come up with permanent solutions to this problem. At this point, the best solution is for the City of Cebu to construct a new abattoir in some other place within Cebu City territory so that we can finally resolve this issue. Is not this the promise of Mayor Michael Rama to straighten up what was crooked and fix what was wrong? Abangan!
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I fully support the newly-approved ordinance by the Cebu City Council as proposed by Councilors Mary Ann delos Santos and Hanz Abella for all restaurants, cafeterias, hospitals and the like to come up with a half-rice portions that they would sell to their consumers. I honestly did not know that two-years ago, Pres. Benigno "PNoy" Aquino III issued a law in pursuant to Presidential Decree no.494 outlining measures to attain self-sufficiency in rice. This was also in response to a survey conducted by the Food and Nutrition Research Institute that showed that every Filipino wastes about two tablespoons of cooked rice for every meal.
A few years ago, I wrote a column questioning the "unlimited rice" promo by fast food restaurants that are eager to bring customers to their restaurants because of this rice they serve without limit. I questioned this promo at that time because of the scarcity of rice we were having. So now it is an ordinance and I hope the City Councils of the Cities of Metro Cebu would craft the same kind of ordinance so finally we can put an end to this wastage!
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