Wednesday, June 13, 2007 Osmeña: Needing foresight like Serging’s By Antonio V. Osmeña Estatements
IT was the foresight of Serging Osmeña Jr. to connect Cebu to world tourism by way of transferring the Lahug airport to the island of Mactan by making it into an international airport and to connect Mactan to mainland Cebu by bridge.
Serging’s Cebu Development Corp. also conceptualized the incorporation in the North Reclamation Project of an international port facility designed to operate bulk container handling. Today, the people of Cebu are enjoying the economic success that is the result of Serging’s foresight.
What foresight do the people of Cebu expect from the new generation of politicians?
Transportation is the most obvious among a city’s shortcomings. Me-tro Cebu’s streets are choked with traffic and pedestrians are suffocating from vehicle fumes. The solution to this is clear: a good public transport system.
The cities of Talisay, Cebu, Mandaue and Lapulapu and the town of Cordova have been trying to keep their transport systems abreast with expanding urban needs.
In Brazil, a busy commercial street was “pedes-trianized” where buses and local traffic were made to run down the center of broad roads while faster traffic whizzed one way down either side.
In 1980, the country’s capital city went increasingly green, creating parks, extending the transport system and bringing in multi-carriage buses. The transport authority collected the fares and paid the bus operators. This bus system has worked well, and it has been copied successfully from Jakarta to Brisbane and Ottawa to Rouen.
In most other places, though, people who can afford cars seem to prefer them. Large areas of land will have to be utilized by motor vehicles for roads and parking spaces.
But in Cebu, infrastructure investments in highways throughout the province have come in trickles. Today’s hodgepodge of widely dispersed shopping centers, housing developments and tangled highway networks whose locations depended largely on where developers could buy land instead of being based on a land use plan for orderly development.
Between 1945 and today, national and local governments tried to reduce auto congestion by constructing thousands of kilometers of roads. But this has encourage more automobiles and travel, causing congestion that decreases the average automobile speed.
Uncontrolled population growth and diminishing job opportunities in overpopulated rural areas have forced people to migrate from the countryside into urban areas. To the growing number of migrants, the city has become a poverty trap, forcing them to squat on the streets or on land of absentee owners.
The historical record of settlers at Barrio Luz should be explored by the concerned government agency since they were the occupants of the downtown railway track which was razed by fire. It was then Gov. Serging Osmena Jr. who was responsible in their relocation to Barrio Luz.
Political will on the part of Gov. Gwen Garcia, in honoring only those original settlers or its heirs as awarded by Serging, should be established to prevent the commercialization of the settlers’ rights.
It is only but fair and equitable that the original awardees or heirs who have hold on to their lots by not selling their rights will be allowed to liquidate their obligation and be issued the title of the land.
Other province owned land within the city of Cebu should be a priority concern of Governor Garcia for a possible redevelopment program that would provide a decent shelter to present settlers. It is about time that our elected officials be concerned about the distribution of Cebu’s resources in an orderly fashion – who gets what, where, when, how and why. Since there is always competition for resources (provincial lots in the city of Cebu) politicians must always deal with conflicting groups, each of which ask for resources.
With the current situation, however, one may ask, what foresight do our politicians have to alleviate the shelter needs of the poor in urban areas?
