Mayor Garcia and the Talamban-Pit-os road

When I was in high school, I tried writing poems hoping to express, from the depths of my youthful emotions, concepts in unique and resonant ways. My romantic mind though came up with love lines mostly. I remember having succeeded to have a work published in the school organ. I was mighty proud then. But, after producing few more poems, most of which were unappreciated by my own peers, I realized that I was not cut out to be a poet. So I just contended myself reading the works of known poets and trying to find relevance of such writings to whatever was taking place in my midst.

Here is something that is not necessarily off-tangent to the nature of this column. It was the first two lines of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow’s poem “The Arrow and the Song” that I remembered when I met Mr. Ronald “Raddy” Diola last Friday. The American poet’s words were “I shot an arrow into the air, it fell to earth, I knew not where.” The arrow was my article entitled “Was it ?156 Million? Where Is It?” which I wrote about three weeks ago. The column was about the widening project of the Talamban-Pit-os road costing some ?156 million. According to Mr. Diola, that arrow, rather that article, unintentionally fell unto the table of Cebu City Mayor Raymond Garcia.

In his poem, Longfellow sighed that his arrow “swiftly it flew, the sight could not follow it in its flight”. Mayor Garcia, perhaps troubled by my query where the ?156 million of public funds was, followed a different tract. The mayor wanted to find out if there was substance to my article. Did I write based on facts? He needed to know where the arrow was or if indeed there was this multi-million-peso 2010 infrastructure project.

Both Mayor Garcia and Mr. Diola, taking initial clue from my article, were shocked by the realization that after 15 long years, the Talamban-Pit-os road remained a narrow stretch. No widening of the street had been done. True there were funds apparently paid to certain owners of land and structures such that those affected buildings were demolished and set back to pave the way for the widening of the road. Nothing more. That is why what was once a lazy 10- minute drive over a span of about six kilometers from Barangays Talamban to Pit-os, now takes a stressful 30-to 40-minute trip.

To make sure that after 15 years of delay, the widening of this important road artery be finally done, he asked Mr. Diola, a private citizen and technocrat, to volunteer (wow, volunteer g’yud!) to his time and energy to synergize the effort. In my talk with him, I learned that Mr. Diola is determined to collate all papers and documents related to this project, find out if there is still money left out of the publicized initial ?156 million, and gather the city’s department heads connected with the implementation of this work as well as officials of national government agencies involved so that the mayor can preside an all-important conference to restart this infrastructure project.

Mr. Diola whispered to me that Mayor Garcia would want to see that the widening of this critical road artery by April. That is just few weeks from now. But he would rather that his constituencies see more his action than hear his erudition. Actually, the mayor has been bombarded with complaints of the daily traffic jams in this area and was scouring for long-lasting solution until his serendipitous discovery of my February 20 article. In Longfellow’s words Mayor Garcia has the “sight so keen and strong” that he saw where the arrow pointed to.