EDITORIAL - What's with the road around Fuente?

Whatever government agency it was that destroyed the road that goes around Fuente Osmeña has left it in its destroyed condition for weeks and has not shown any sign of restoring or repairing what it has done. That is correct. It has been weeks since the road was destroyed – its asphalt pavement scraped off – and whoever did it left it in that condition. Or at least, up until this article was written, in the afternoon of Friday, May 26, 2017.

If, by the time you read this, the road had been repaired the previous night, then well and good. At least it did not take an entire month to do the repairs. But the sinking feeling is that by the time you read this, still no repairs will probably be made. And the reason why no repairs will still be made can in fact be more damning than the reason why they tore up the road in the first place.

The reason why there seems to be no haste in repairing the road around Fuente Osmeña is because there was absolutely no reason to tear it up. The road around Fuente Osmeña at the time it was torn up was in perfectly good condition. It may not have been in mint condition the way newly-paved roads are, but it was still good. There were no holes big or small. Neither were there any cracks, bumps or whatever.

But it appears that the government has a penchant for tearing up roads that are still in perfect condition, perhaps for no other reason than that there is a budget for its repair that it feels must be spent. To be sure, it is a good thing that there is a ready budget for repairs. But if something needs no repairing, going ahead and repairing it sure does look like wasting.

This has happened so many times before and there is nothing on the horizon that suggests it will not be happening again. And indeed in the case of Fuente, it has happened again. The most notable past experience Cebuanos had involving the tearing up of a perfectly good road just so it can be repaired again was the concrete road in Banawa. They tore it up and then concreted it again. And the only gain anyone had from the experience was the months of inconvenience.

But at least with the Banawa experience, those who tore up the road wasted no time in repairing it again. This time, in the case of Fuente, they tore up the road weeks ago and left it at that. As said earlier, at the time of this writing, in the afternoon of Friday, May 26, 2017, the road was still in complete disrepair. As the old folk in times past would say, it is like a dog just leaving his poop.