CEBU City Acting Mayor Margarita Osmeña should have also considered the relevance of the Cebu City Medical Center (CCMC) to the large sector of the population in Cebu City as one of the parameters in deciding whether to stop the construction of the new hospital or not.
Marc Canton, lead convenor of Movement for a Livable Cebu (MLC), gave this suggestion yesterday as his reaction to the suspension of work order of the CCMC project.
Aside from Cebu City not having a city hospital, Canton said that those who avail of the services of the city hospital belong to 70 percent of the population, who couldn’t easily gain access to bigger and costlier private hospitals.
“The parameters used to analyze a go or no go decision must come from this area, and not, whether or not the building is encroaching on the road or not. That’s an excuse. A shallow and lame one,” said Canton, in a post to MLC’s public group on Facebook together with a link to a Cebu Daily News article about the stoppage.
“It is good they are discussing this issue before they build the structure. But I do not agree that these are the parameters to use in deciding whether or not to build a city hospital, the only one the city could have,” Canton said.
The MLC has been actively supporting efforts to restore and rehabilitate the old hospital building since it was deemed unfit for occupancy after the 7.2 magnitude earthquake struck Bohol and Cebu in 2013.
Acting Mayor Osmeña ordered the suspension of the construction of the CCMC project last week after it was found out that it had no building permit and that one of the foundations of the 10-story building was encroaching on an unidentified lot in Panganiban Street.
Architect Miko Espina, a member of MLC and the main architect of the hospital building, also commented on Canton’s post saying they were just recently informed of the deficiencies.
He said in the post that they were able to submit documents for the building permit in November 2015 but it was only last June 15, 2016 when their office received the list of deficiencies of the project.
Other members of the group, who commented on Canton’s FB post, called the stoppage order as “politically motivated.”
The new CCMC building is one of the pet projects of suspended Cebu City Mayor Michael Rama, who is the political rival of Acting Mayor Margarita Osmeña and her husband, Mayor-elect Tomas Osmeña, who will assume office on June 30.
When sought for comment during a press conference in his residence in Barangay Guadalupe yesterday afternoon, Mayor-elect Osmeña said both the contractor C.E. Padilla Construction and the architect could be held liable for continuing with the building’s construction without the building permit yet.
“The contractor is liable for building a building without a building permit. Very liable. It might even be the basis for canceling the contract. The law is very clear on this. It’s called technical malversation … The architect is also at fault because they don’t have a building permit. You can’t start a construction without a building permit,” Mayor-elect Osmeña said.
Mayor-elect Osmeña also said that there was no transparency in the CCMC project.