Many adverse comments have been said towards delays in government action. In the local dialect there is a term for delays. Many call it “ginobierno”. There is no sense of urgency.
It is normal for government to be slow, like a turtle, in the processing of anything. But in this situation as described below, the slowness cost the taxpayers hundreds of millions of pesos in funds that could have been used for other projects and benefited the people.
In this case, the slowness benefitted the landowners, not the public in general. A good example is happening in the Tacloban Airport Development project particularly on the matter of land acquisition.
This project will require the acquisition of 76 lots. Paperwork on the acquisition started in early 2023. when the Department of Transportation entered into a Memorandum of Agreement with the Taclobab City Government. This MOA gave the city government the responsibility of carrying out the acquisition with a budget of 300 million pesos. Fast forward to the present, February 2025 or three years after the signing of the MOA.
The owners of ten of these 76 lots have not showed up to the City Government to agree, negotiate or contest the acquisition of their lots. And, read this – the City Government requested for 295 million pesos more, because of this delayed acquisition.
Also, the new BIR-enforced zonal values that started in January 2024, caught up with the city government thus vastly increasing the cost of land by at least one hundred present. The 300 million pesos needed will now be 595 million pesos.
There is more to this than meets the eye. More scrutiny is needed to ascertain what happened here. As this writer mentioned in the February 17, 2025, meeting of the RDC Regional Project Monitoring Committee, the City Government was slow in the processing of this land acquisition that it overlooked the time-tested method of speedy acquisition to support a government project.The city government was advised by this Committee as early as May 2023 to expedite the acquisition because of the impending implementation of increased zonal values.
Officials at the city government did not follow standard government procedures using an effective tool granted by no less than the Philippine Constitution that gives the state the power of eminent domain and the conduct of expropriation proceedings. In my opinion the 300 million pesos initially allocated for land acquisition was more than what was needed if the City Government did its role promptly as an arm of the government and part of the state that follows the Regalian Doctrine in dealings involving land. If there is no owner of the land, then that land is the property of the state.
There is no need to buy it. It is the government. Simply put, in this land acquisition the government lost millions of funds or otherwise stated, it “overspent” by that amount because it acted slowly on an urgent matter.
A sidelight to this matter of land acquisition is that there are still ten lots, as reported by the city government, with owners who have not showed up to answer the call for them to appear before the authorized officials and state whether they agree or not to the government offered purchase price.
To say it again for emphasis, three years into the announcement that these lands will be purchased, the owner or owners of these ten lots have not showed up.
The crucial question is: why has the City Government not initiated expropriation proceedings? The delay is unbelievable and lends credence to the idea that these lots are owned by only an individual who cannot either appear in person because of an illness or is waiting for a price increase and pounce on the 295 million pesos soon to be released by the national government.
There are several high government officials who reside near the airport. Perhaps they can help settle this mess.
Bottom line: this matter should be investigated by the Office of the Ombudsman. This published column should suffice to meet the requirement of investigating “motu proprio” or without need for a complaint. Let us see what happens.
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