A P3-B loan with no transparency?

By now you must have read the news reports that the Cebu City Council has authorized Cebu City Mayor Tomas Osmeña to avail of a P3-billion loan with the Land Bank of the Philippines in order to fund infrastructure projects, like the muchneeded drainage plans and road concreting programs. I am all for this loan, even if we taxpayers would be shouldering its cost. However what we need from our city officials is transparency of the highest order. After all, a P3-billion loan isn't peanuts!

My readers know that when there is talk of infrastructure projects, it gets my immediate attention.After all, I spent a good many years of my life as Chairman of the Regional Development Council's(RDC-7)InfrastructureUtilitiesCommittee(IUC),which was later changed to Infrastructure Development Committee (IDC) where my good friend Emmanuel Rabacal took over after I left. Yes, we still have infrastructure in my DNA.

If there is anything that is so easy to secure these days, it is a bank loan. After all, bank loans are the life-blood of banks. So may we ask which roads are being planned for concreting? I hope the mayor would include Juana Osmeña Street and its extension not because I pass the area every day, but because Juana Osmeña is the busiest secondary road in Cebu City. Thanks to two major schools, Sacred Heart for Girls and the St. Theresa's College and yes, the presence of the Redemptorist Church.

For those of you who lived in Cebu City since your birth, you must remember that the first major traffic problem Cebu City experienced was along Mango Avenue on Wednesdays and Sundays because of Redemptorist Church. Yes, while the rest of Metro Cebu enjoyed relatively a traffic-free environment, but during Wednesdays and Sundays' private radio organizations like Search of which I was a member would help the traffic authorities man the intersections along Mango Avenue.

Of course, this was before the era of the Cebu City Traffic Operations and Management now called Cebu City Traffic Office. Traffic along Juana Osmeña then was taxed to the full, hence this street need to be concreted. So the first question to ask is, whether or not Juana Osmeña Street is included in this new loan that the City of Cebu is getting from the Land Bank?

The other question I would like to pose which drainage project is Mayor Osmeña going to pursue? If I recall, Mega Cebu, a program of the Metro Cebu Development Coordinating Board, had a serious discussion on the drainage projects for Metro Cebu in the committee chaired by Engr. Fortunato Sanchez before Department of Public Works and Highways Secretary Mark Villar who was dead serious in funding our drainage projects. I hope these drainage projects would be implemented next year.

So the question I would like to pose is, whether or not this P3-billion loan with Land Bank is a duplication of a drainage project planned by DPWH? I'm posing this query simply because a little over a year ago, specifically July 15, 2016, Mayor Osmeña announced that the City of Cebu would no longer be involved with the Mega Cebu program. Let me quote a news report on what Mayor Osmeña said about his withdrawal from MEGA Cebu. "Mega Cebu doesn't exist. Legally, they don't exist. What is their authority? Were they elected? Are they a legal person? Can they enter into a contract with the government? They don't exist," he said. He also said he will no longer reveal details on his plans to construct flyovers and underpasses in several intersections in the city. He did say he hopes that the bidding for 10 flyovers and underpasses will be conducted next year. These projects, Osmeña said, will help address traffic."

That was July 2016 and today, we still have no idea about the 10 flyovers and underpasses that the City of Cebu is supposed to undertake, which is why we are asking, albeit, demanding transparency from our elected officials. Surely we are not asking much for the mayor to reveal his infrastructure plans, more so that this would entail getting a loan that I'm sure that your grandchildren and my grandchildren would be paying until they graduate from college. If we don't get any transparency from the mayor, then I don't think that the people of Cebu City should be supporting him on this proposed P3-billion loan.