AMID the “concrete jungle” in uptown Cebu City, a park filled with greenery will soon rise inside the Capitol compound.
Gov. Gwendolyn Garcia said the Provincial Government will use the site fronting Escario St. as a park and parking lot now that the area is compacted to leveled ground again.
The excavated project site in the Capitol compound where a 20-story building was supposed to stand has been completely backfilled and compacted, three months after a group of private haulers offered to dump their excavated materials at the area for free.
The private contractor that was supposed to build the facility had already pulled out its heavy equipment from the project site.
“We will have it landscaped, but it will have a utilitarian value in the sense that it will be a park and parking lot. I’d like to start that as soon as possible,” Garcia said on Wednesday, Oct.30, 2019.
The governor, though, will still have to discuss the matter with the Provincial Agriculture Office and Provincial Engineering Office.
It will be the agriculture office that will source out which kinds of ornamental flowers and other plants will fit the park.
“We need first to establish a plan. Where do we put the parking lot? Do we integrate this with the park? I need to see a more holistic picture of the overall area,” Garcia said.
Although the plan is still in its early stages, Garcia said she has already started getting feelers from private personalities who are interested in helping the Province realize the project.
“We’re trying to work out an arrangement so that we can also see the input of Cebuanos who wish to help, the way the area was filled up because of the generosity and civic-mindedness of Cebuanos,” she added.
As this developed, Garcia said the compaction of the excavated site will not preclude the possibility of Capitol filing charges against WT Construction Inc. (WTCI).
She reiterated that the Province has two reasons to blacklist the private contractor, which had defied her order to backfill the excavated lot in July.
The grounds to ban WTCI from doing any government project are its destruction of the Commission on Audit building and its claim that the single largest contract it had won was for the construction of the Cebu International Convention Center.
“These will also be the same grounds of which we might be filing that case. The blacklisting, on the other hand, is still underway,” Garcia added. RTF