Was it P156 million? Where is it now?

I wrote an entirely different article for today while I was enjoying the cool breeze in my small garden plot located in the mountains of Barangay Paril, this city. The original topic was on my favorite peeve - incompetent senatorial candidates and those pushed by powerful political dynasties. While on my way home, I decided to edit my write up. I knew I had enough time to finish reading back my article. To my shock, an otherwise pleasant trip took unusually long. Travel time was not well spent because its length amounted to tremendous waste.

The stretch from Barangay Pit-os to Barangay Talamban is short. The distance between these two villages, (after passing thru intervening Barangays Bacayan and San Jose) is probably just six to seven kilometers. If we drive a theoretically very slow thirty kilometers per hour speed, we can complete the travel in twelve minutes, more or less. Yesterday, my trip took me a horrible one-hour period to cover that distance such that I finished editing my work before I reached Barangay Bacayan, coming from my Paril garden. It was markedly too long a time driving thru such a short span! The terrible experience drove my mind to change my article totally from a bombastic political exposition (what a relief!) to a kind of trivial problem even if my deadline was already close at hand.

I am familiar with that road to Pit-os. In 1983, I purchased a piece of land there where 45 large mango trees were grown. Every little time gap I had in my early years of lawyering was spent making those trees productive. The share of the modest income which I would give Pedro Luna, my loyal farm hand, would never fail to make him and his family smile. God’s incredible blessing. More so because the frequent trips covering about thirteen kilometers from my home at Barangay Kasambagan to my little farm would only take no more than twenty minutes. With few vehicles competing for road space, driving then was pleasurable.

“Ceboom,” the famous Lito Osmeña marketing billboard then came. The subliminal effect of Ceboom founded the blinding economic growth of our city. Investing in Cebu was infectious. Example: One residential subdivision after another got established in the once agricultural area from Talamban to Pit-os. Real estate developers from the country’s top corporate planners like the Ayala and Sta Lucia Realty and Development Inc., joined local businessmen Aboitiz Realty and Primary Homes in building houses where there were agricultural farms. In contouring hills, they had to cut trees (goodness!) My last count hit about thirty small, pocket, middle-sized and fairly large high end subdivisions. Naturally, thousands have chosen to live there. Vehicular traffic increased by enormous leaps and bounds.

My previous easy drives to Pit-os became increasingly difficult. No, not just hard. Hellish could be more appropriate term to use. The opening line of the 1854 Lord Alfred Tennyson’s poem The Charge of the Light Brigade materialized with cars to the left of me and cars to the right of me still constricting the already narrow Talamban-Pit-os road. People, ironically speaking, began to accept the real meaning of the word Pit-os.

Sometime in 2010, a hope for a better traffic in the Talamban-Pit-os stretch bloomed. I remember that the city government (was it just the city?) decided to widen the road. Wow! An appropriation of a whopping P156,000,000 was reportedly passed. Is this recollection correct? True indeed, not long after, several owners of land and structures along the project area were paid the supposed fair and just compensation. Many of them demolished their homes and reconstructed their houses with the indented areas left open. But that was almost fifteen years ago! The initial stages of road widening stopped. The project has visibly been abandoned. Why? Meanwhile, traffic jams have become increasing daily occurrences. We ordinary citizens have not read of any further explanation from our government officials what happened to the project itself and to the budget allocated for the solution of this traffic problem. The Commission on Audit and the Ombudsman should investigate.