Moratorium on creation of provincial roads ends

By Vency D. Bulayungan

LAGAWE, Ifugao -- The five - year moratorium on the adoption or creation of provincial roads in Ifugao to give way to the development of the existing 224.571 kms length of provincial roads, has ended.

As embodied in provincial ordinance no. 2005-024 authored by then board member Eugene Balitang, now governor, it also mandates a minimum annual appropriation of P10 million purposely for the rehabilitation and improvement of all existing provincial roads and bridges.

Dubbed Provincial Road Improvement Ordinance of 2005, it was implemented by the provincial government through the provincial engineering office since 2006 primarily for rehabilitation and improvement of all existing roads and bridges which focused on road concreting.

As of 2005, only 18% of the provincial roadswere paved with concrete while majority at 82%wasclassified either as gravel or earth.

The imposition of the ordinance was meant to address dearth of provincial roads linking all provincial roads to the main provincial road and national trunk line.

For the past five years, the PEO headed by engineer Orlando Sarol reported around 100 infrastructure projects were funded and implemented by the provincial government.

Of the total projects implemented, 88 were focused on concreting of unpaved provincial roads with nine riprap projects including two bridge abutments, two canal linings and one box culvert.

The 88 road concreting projects had a total cost of P48.55million or 93% of the total program cost.

The rest which is P3.35M went to the other projects on riprapping, road canal lining and box culvert.

Records obtained from the PEO reveal the total aggregate road length concreted was 10.70 kilometers distributed across the various provincial roads located in the ten municipalities except Hungduan which has no provincial road.

Based on the new inventory of provincial roads and bridges, the Ifugao has 21 major provincial road trunk lines with total provincial road length of 178.6711 kilometers.

Of the total provincial roads, only 27% or 47.4395 kilometers are paved with concrete while the rest are either paved with gravel at 50% or 89.6216 kilometers and 23% or 41.61 kilometers earth road.