Sona misses veggie highway plagued by graft

Philippine Daily Inquirer

BAGUIO CITY – The Rehabilitation of a major Cordillera highway that is used to transport vegetables to Metro Manila is one of President Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo’s unfulfilled promises that she made in previous State of the Nation Addresses (Sona).

Documents showed that the Commission on Audit (COA) had started an investigation of the delayed modernization of the 180-kilometer Halsema Highway, in light of reports from a local civic group called the Volunteers Against Corruption (VAC) and local churches that corruption and inefficiency plagued this priority project.

Hermogenes Esperon Jr., chief of the Presidential Management Staff (PMS), and COA Chairman Reynaldo Villar authorized the investigation as early as June to unravel the issues preventing the highway’s completion, a COA document showed.

Inspectors

Thomas Killip, presidential assistant on Cordillera affairs, and the COA regional office would inspect the Mt. Province section of the highway on Friday and Saturday.

Juniper Dominguez, VAC spokesman, said his group was not surprised that Ms Arroyo did not mention the Halsema Highway in her Sona on Monday, unlike her previous speeches.

Ms Arroyo often said she valued the modernization of this road because her father, the late President Diosdado Macapagal, had initiated the building of the highway.

Dominguez said Killip, the PMS and Press Secretary Cerge Remonde had received an independent status evaluation of Halsema from the VAC, the Social Action Development Center (SADC) of the Catholic Diocese of Bontoc (Mt. Province) and Lagawe (Ifugao), and the Episcopal Diocese of Kalinga.

Halsema stretches from La Trinidad town in Benguet to Mt. Province and to the tourist town of Banaue in Ifugao.

Initial cost: P1B

Juan Ngalob, Cordillera director of the National Economic and Development Authority (Neda), said the first 84-kilometer section cost the government P1 billion when it upgraded the highway from La Trinidad to Mount Data in Bauko, Mt. Province, in March 2006.

Rehabilitation of the 51-km stretch from Mount Data to the Mt. Province capital of Bontoc and the 45-km section from Bontoc to Banaue is ongoing and is scheduled to be completed by the end of the year.

The highway has since been expanded to link Mt. Province and Ifugao with Kalinga, with up to P5.5 billion in government allocations.

“It is the section leading to Kalinga [and the roads leading to Tuguegarao City in Cagayan] where there are problems because the highway would affect private lands. Slippages [delays in work schedule] have reached 15 percent in some stretches so the Cordillera Regional Development Council [RDC] created an infrastructure monitoring and advisory committee to deal with [these] problems,” Ngalob said. Vincent Cabreza, Inquirer Northern Luzon

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