EDITORIAL - Real waste is leaving CICC to rot

Cebu Governor Hilario Davide III has reportedly vowed not to spend a centavo to rehabilitate the Cebu International Convention Center, rendered unsafe in a 7.2-magnitude earthquake in 2013. His reason – it would be a waste of people's money to rehabilitate a facility that has been tainted by still unproven allegations of overpricing in its construction.

Such reasoning won't fly. The CICC was built in 2007 for P840 million to serve as one of the venues for the Asean Summit Cebu hosted. Even if the allegations of overpricing eventually turn out to be true (they are now the subject of litigation) they still will not detract from the fact that the Cebu hosting of the Asean Summit was a huge success and that the main reason for building the CICC was more than amply satisfied.

If it turns out that some people made money out of building the CICC, that is still an entirely different thing altogether and cannot be used as a measure to determine the success or failure of Cebu in hosting the Asean Summit, of which the CICC played a large and important part. If the hosting was a success, then the CICC was a success as well by serving the purpose for which it was built.

Taken in that light, the CICC cannot therefore be called a waste of people's money if its reason for being has been hailed as a rousing success. If there are anomalies that may be proven later, that will involve people who were a party to its construction and not the facility for whose construction people's money was spent. And since people's money may be considered well spent in this light, the real waste of people's money will be in doing nothing to even try and save CICC.

If the governor truly meant what he was supposed to have said, that he will not spend a centavo to rehabilitate the CICC, then leaving it to rot will be tantamount to leaving it to waste, including the people's money that was spent to build it. If he thinks that by leaving the CICC to rot he can lay the blame for the waste of people's money on his political enemies, then he cannot be farther off the mark.

His political enemies did not waste people's money on CICC even if in his eyes they profited from its construction. The CICC successfully served its purpose, remember? Nobody has gone on record to claim the Asean Summit hosting was an abject failure. If there is anybody who will be wasting people's money here, it will be no other than Davide himself if he makes good his promise not to do anything to rehabilitate the facility. When the CICC rots, it will be on Davide's name, not anyone's.