Fundraising time

THAT ELECTIONS next year is all but a certainty, with the PI option out of the way, is attested by the flurry of infra projects being implemented all over the place.

Take my hometown, for example, which I visited last week. Instead of repairing, or at least completing the long overdue reblocking of the pockmarked Fuentebella Highway connecting Partido to the main line, filling materials suddenly littered the roadside in Sagrada and up to God knows where.

When the long-standing problem is the deteriorated concrete road, long sawn off in preparation for reblocking under previous DPWH efforts, they dump filling materials for the shoulder! And at the height of the typhoon season yet, with 11 more set to follow after Milenyo.

Band-aid efforts like these, however, are most convenient: the amount are probably small enough to skirt public bidding requirements. When the rains come, these will be washed away. Project details are known only to a select few, with the DPWH website wholly useless if one tries to find out background info. And materials used are probably within the purview of activities that can be funded out the CARP money.

My former editor, Joe Obias, is correct: "In every public works project is a crime." But unlike the PI, there is no Supreme Court that will prevent perpetrators from ramming these down our throats.