BAGUIO CITY, Philippines — Three weeks before her final State of the Nation Address (Sona), President Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo has received guarantees that the road projects in the Cordillera would be completed by December this year, a Malacañang official said here.

Intrigues have beset the P1.9-billion modernization of the Halsema Highway, which links Benguet to Mt. Province and Ifugao, owing to engineering anomalies.

But Thomas Killip, presidential assistant for Cordillera affairs, said he had assured the President that the road project would be completed by yearend.

Killip said Ms Arroyo had asked him to oversee the completion of the project.

Modernization

The concreting of Halsema Highway was initiated by Ms Arroyo’s father, the late President Diosdado Macapagal, but its modernization had taken decades as well as several episodes of graft.

The highway links Baguio and Manila to vegetable farms in Benguet and Mt. Province, and is considered the major road leading to interior towns of Ifugao and Kalinga.

Defective

In October 2007, Public Works Secretary Hermogenes Ebdane Jr. ordered contractors to replace portions of the highway leading to Mt. Data in Bauko, Mt. Province, when he discovered that these were defective.

Government sources circulated Killip’s May 8 letter to Ms Arroyo about suspending work until government could correct engineering defects and “ghost” projects that had hampered progress in completing the Halsema Highway project and the P3.2-billion gravelling of the road linking Bontoc, Mt. Province to Tabuk City in Kalinga and Tuguegarao, Cagayan.

But Killip said the latest report he sent to Ms Arroyo indicated there was progress in the road project.