Paying for the same flood twice

We should have learned our lesson about ghost projects. It has barely been a year since the President zeroed out locally funded flood control works because of a national scandal that gutted the 2026 budget request by PHP 377 billion.

Now the money is creeping back into the 2027 National Expenditure Program, and the numbers are telling a very strange story about Western Visayas.

The most jarring figure in this proposed budget is not the 67% cornered by Iloilo province, but the PHP 688.925 million quietly earmarked for the Lamunan River Downstream project in San Rafael.

San Rafael is one of 14 Iloilo towns we previously documented as receiving zero new flood control works since 2022.

The other 13 towns — places like Balasan, Batad, and Sara — are apparently still waiting for a miracle.

Typhoon Ursula completely submerged all 23 barangays of Balasan. Flooding in Sara displaced more than 6,000 residents just two years ago while Batad saw 2,151 people driven from their homes in September 2022.

Voters in those municipalities now have a specific, answerable question to hurl at their congressional representatives while this budget is still in deliberation: is my town in the document, and if not, why not.

If San Rafael is the only municipality that suddenly moves from zero to a massive windfall, then the region did not get a needs-based budget. It got one town’s political breakthrough while everyone else is left to drown.

Then there is the absolute engineering miracle happening along our coastlines. Our review uncovered 12 separate line items priced at exactly PHP 92.33 million.

Multiple river control projects — including four of five Tumagbok River packages in Miagao — sit at exactly PHP 93 million.

Shorelines and riverbanks are wildly unpredictable, asymmetrical forces of nature.

Uniform costs are not an engineering output. Identical figures across physically different sections heavily suggest that these cost estimates were derived backward from a convenient allocation ceiling, rather than forward from actual surveys, quantities, and unit prices.

This does not immediately prove a crime, but it is a blinding warning light. If project estimates are artificially shaped to fit predetermined ceilings rather than actual engineering requirements, taxpayers either overpay for dirt or receive structures far too weak to protect them.

The Department of Public Works and Highways has a defensible way out of this. They just need to publish the program of works and detailed estimates for each identically priced package.

The Department of Budget has promised that these restored funds will face stricter vetting this time around.

Vetting that merely checks compliance paperwork without ever interrogating how a suspiciously round number was derived is not vetting.

The government must make engineering plans, geotagged sites, and audit findings publicly accessible before releasing a single peso.

Transparency must be a hard condition of funding, not a damage-control press release deployed after the irregularities emerge.

Flood-control failures cost us vastly more than our taxes. They wash away homes, farms, businesses, and human lives.

We have to frame the test right now, before the enacted budget is signed, so the standard exists to measure against later.

Otherwise, we are just paying for the exact same flood twice.