We’ll need more than life vests

To be fair, Cebu City Mayor Michael Rama had the public’s welfare in mind when he accepted the donation of hundreds of life vests from the former Sulpicio Lines Inc.

He wants to distribute them to city residents in flood-prone areas, specifically those living near creeks and rivers.

We have to ask, though, whether urban flooding is so terrible in the city that we can expect to end up swimming in chest-high water during the rainy season.

Drainage problems do stall cars, and leave residents wading in ankle to knee-deep sewer water after a downpour.

The inconvenience and traffic jams are just as worrying as the risk of getting afflicted with leptospirosis.

It seems like a crazy idea to hand out life vests to city dwellers but then weather patterns are so wacky like Typhoon Ondoy’s dumping a month’s worth of rainfall in a few hours, that life vests just symbolize a problem that has grown larger than life.

What Rama probably meant, with his choice of donation as hyperbole, was to skewer the the City Council for not approving his half-billion-peso budget for drainage and cutting it down to P100 million.

For now, the city government is kept busy desilting and dredging water channels to improve water flow.

Poor drainage isn’t the oversight of one set of officials.

Missing the chance to execute a solution came years ago, with Rama still around as vice mayor, when a Flood Mitigation and Drainage Study was done by City Hall consultants and submitted in 2004.

The half-billion cost at the time was still not approved by the City Council, which he presided.

Now sitting on the other side of the political fence, as mayor, Rama still can’t get the drainage plan rolled out.

When the City Council reduced the budget or this, it said it was unsure the administration could earn enough revenue for Rama’s wish list, and that it wanted to monitor how the funds would be spent for both current requested and past budget allocations.

That was a curt way of saying “we’re not political allies anymore so we’ll hound you for every centavo you spend regardless of the crisis.”

As the heavens open, sending down rain generous enough to swamp the city, don’t you think it’s time that drainage, and the need to find solutions, is a common goal and not a political football anymore?