The Bicol Road Projects That Were Promised by 2022, and What the Record Still Does Not Show

Six Bicol road projects were given names, lengths and completion dates in a 2021 account of the Department of Public Works and Highways programme, with the earliest due that December and the latest running past 2022. The same account put 1,670 kilometres of road built or improved in the region, and 295 bridges, as the figures standing at the time.

This is a five-year-old record, not news. It’s worth revisiting for one reason: every promise in it carries a date, and dates are checkable.

The six Bicol road projects and the dates attached to them

• Camalig Bypass Road, Albay. 3.5 km, ₱237.44 million, opened 15 June 2021 after almost three years of construction. The only one of the six carrying a peso figure in this account.
• Albay-Sorsogon Connector Road. 15.87 km, due December 2021. Reconnects the Legazpi City-Punta de Jesus Road with the Jct. Sorsogon-Bacon-Manito Road. Manito Proper to Sorsogon City was to drop to an hour for around 5,000 daily travellers.
• Barcelona-Casiguran Road, Sorsogon. 15.47 km, due December 2021, saving 10 to 12 minutes between the two towns.
• Cagraray Circumferential Road, Albay. 40.01 km, due December 2022, joining the Sto. Domingo-Buhatan-Cagraray Island Circumferential Road via Sula Bridge. Cagraray Island to Bacacay was to fall from four hours to just over one.
• Camarines Sur Expressway. 15.21 km, San Fernando to Pili, explicitly scheduled beyond 2022. Travel time from 51 minutes to 11.
• Sorsogon City Coastal Road. 5.66 km, diverting traffic from Daang Maharlika.

Camalig Bypass is the one with a number on it

₱237.44 million for 3.5 kilometres works out at roughly ₱68 million a kilometre. That’s arithmetic performed here, not a figure from the record, and unit costs vary enormously with terrain, land acquisition and bridging, so it’s a starting point for a question rather than a verdict.

It’s the only one of the six with a cost attached in this account. The other five have lengths and deadlines and no budget, which is the more common shape and the harder one to hold anybody to.

Why five-year-old Bicol road projects still matter

A completion date is a commitment somebody made in public. Once it passes, one of three things is true. The road opened roughly on time, it opened late, or it didn’t open. All three are findable, and none of them is in this record.

The regional framing is worth noticing too. The stated goal was cutting Ilocos to Bicol from twenty hours to nine, with Bicol as the southern end of a Luzon-wide spine. That makes these local roads part of a national programme, which matters when you go looking for who reports on them and to whom.

What we could not verify

• Whether any of the five outstanding roads actually opened, and on what date. Nothing here establishes completion for anything except Camalig Bypass.
• The budgets for five of the six. Only Camalig Bypass carries a peso figure in this account.
• Final costs against approved costs. A ₱237.44 million figure at inauguration isn’t necessarily what was appropriated or what was ultimately paid.
• Whether the travel-time claims held. An hour to Sorsogon City and 11 minutes from San Fernando to Pili were projections, and no measured figure appears.
• The current status of the Camarines Sur Expressway, which was scheduled beyond 2022 with no end date given at all.
• Whether the 1,670 kilometres and 295 bridges are cumulative regional totals or programme-specific. The difference changes what the numbers mean entirely.

The documents that would settle it

DPWH keeps project-level records, and its regional office covers exactly this ground. A completion report names a date, a contractor and a final cost. The Commission on Audit publishes annual audit reports on the department, which is where variances between approved and final cost surface. Both are public.

For Bicol road projects specifically, the useful move is narrow. Take one road with a passed deadline, ask for its completion report, and see whether the answer arrives. That’s a smaller question than auditing a programme, and it is the sort that gets answered.

We are recording the promises here as they were stated in 2021, with their dates intact, so anyone can check them against what exists now. Nothing above should be read as a finding that any road was or was not delivered.

Source SunStar. Written from the original report.