Rep. Raul del Mar's challenge for MCTA

There is some kind of controversy hanging over House Bill no. 3955 dubbed the Metro Cebu Traffic Authority (MCTA) authored by Rep. Raul del Mar. Many people do not know much about this bill, from Cebu City Mayor Tomas Osmeña, some councilors and other local government executives. This only proves that Filipinos have indeed very poor memories. Rep. Raul del Mar adopted this bill since it was one of those proposed bills that came from what we call ground up.

Usually, our congressmen and women come up with a proposed bill and then sell the idea to the people through consultation and eventually via a public hearing. This is not the case for MCTA as this proposal came from the participants of the 1st Metro Cebu Traffic Summit, which was attended by many local government officials, jeepney and taxi drivers and operators organizations and even the various urban poor represented by the sidewalk vendors association and the Cebu Chamber of Commerce and Industry.

The whole damn trouble is, memories are fast fading. The officers of the organizations that participated in the Traffic Summit are no longer at the top of their organizations, including me. I was CITOM chief when the City of Cebu sponsored the Traffic Summit; in fact during my stint we sponsored two traffic summits - the First Cebu City Traffic Summit in October 1995 and the First Metro Cebu Traffic Summit in October of 2001. This is why I’m writing this piece to refresh the memories of those who already forgot about MCTA.

At that time I was told that sending such a law to Congress might be a bad idea because it just takes too long (they were right) for Congress to give the people the laws that would help them make daily life easier or less bureaucratic. But, I said to myself, the problem with the current structure of government in this country is, it is just too Manila-centric because national government agencies were controlled by Manila.

Thus in order for Cebu to grow a little bit faster, back in 1989 Rep. Raul del Mar with the help of then Sen. Sonny Osmeña, Cebu Governor Lito Osmeña, supported by Mayor Osmeña, enacted laws that created the Mactan Cebu International Airport Authority (MCIAA) and the Cebu Port Authority (CPA). You can find out yourself whether these national government agencies or facilities in its present form have done a lot for the development of Cebu. In the old days of the Mactan Alternate International Airport (MAIA) one of the biggest problems was a serious lack of toilet paper, thanks to the bureaucracy of the Board of Air Transportation (BAT) whose officials couldn’t give Cebuanos an airport fitting its international status.

Take a good look at the Cebu Port Authority today. Finally under the watch of Angie Verdan and international pressure to clean up the port and piers, the Port of Cebu is one of the cleanest in the country today (except for the filth and dirt in our seawater). Best of all, the squatters have been eliminated as they pose a security threat to our port. When the port was in the hands of Manila-based appointees, the number of squatters into the port increased because the port managers then couldn’t care less if areas of the port were squatted or not. I dare say that if the Port of Cebu weren’t created into an authority, we would see much of the same in the way port operations are carried out.

Back to the issue of MCTA. Do we really need it? Let me just say that if we needed it ten years ago, I think all the more we need it today. People are just contented to live within their comfort zones. There is no question that the City of Cebu is proud of developing the most advance traffic management systems at par with Metro Manila, while traffic management in the other cities of Metro Cebu is at best dismal. When Mandaue City had its Tedman, it did a credible job handling traffic in Mandaue city except they lacked the political will to remove those rickety trisikads off the national roads where they do not belong.

Traffic management in Lapu-Lapu City or Talisay City is virtually nonexistent except for a couple of major intersections. Naturally I can sense why Mayor Tomas Osmeña is no longer interested in the creation of MCTA because he doesn’t want the other LGUs who have no experience in traffic management to be decision-makers in MCTA whose ignorance or worse, their political bickering might spill over into MCTA. I can understand his position on this but whether we like it or not, the time for MCTA has come. Perhaps the biggest challenge of Rep. Raul del Mar is how to professionalize MCTA so it can best serve the citizens of Metro Cebu, while maintaining Cebu City’s major role as the big brother in Traffic Management.