Billions and broken promises: Oro’s grand budget meets gritty reality

 AT dawn, the stench of rot clings to this city’s streets.

Weary workers, without personal protective equipment, move through the half-light, hauling mounds of refuse that sat uncollected for days. 

It’s an increasingly familiar tableau in 2025, emblematic of a city’s basic services buckling even as local officials tout an unprecedented P6.6-billion executive budget for 2026.

On paper, Mayor Rolando ‘Klarex’ Uy’s administration is pouring money into roads and hospitals. On the ground, governance woes — garbage crises, health scares, and unfinished infrastructure — tell a far opaque story.

A city awash in promises

City Hall’s proposed P6.6-billion budget, the largest in Cagayan de Oro’s history, devotes its biggest share to construction and care. 

The City Engineer’s Office commands P1.02 billion, roughly 15.5 percent, for roads, drainage, and flood control. The City Health Office follows at P885 million, intended to shore up hospitals and disease prevention programs.

The City Social Welfare office gets P712 million to sustain post-pandemic aid. 

Meanwhile, the City Environment and Natural Resources Office and the Agriculture Office — tasked with cleaning the city and feeding it — receive barely 1.8 percent combined.

Mayor Uy calls the plan “people-centric.” 

His slogan, Build, Heal, Protect, suggests a government bent on visibility: projects that can be ribbon-cut, hospitals that can be photographed, programs that can be branded.

Yet the arithmetic of ambition hides a bleaker calculus. As the budget moved toward council debate, the city reeled from mounting trash, rising fevers, and half-finished public works that symbolized not progress but paralysis.

The garbage that wouldn’t go away

Nowhere is that dissonance sharper than in solid-waste management.

As City Hall proposed just P67 million for Clenro, a full-blown garbage crisis was erupting. Piles of refuse choked J.R. Borja Extension and low-lying districts. 

A Department of Environment probe later found the Pagalungan landfill operating without a protective liner, its leachate plant idle — an environmental hazard buried under political neglect.

By late September, the city switched garbage contractors, hiring a water-treatment firm with hulking 10-wheelers unsuited to narrow barangay alleys.

Accidents followed; pickups were missed. The mayor responded with a two-week “Task Force Basura” blitz, personally leading nighttime collections in front of cameras.

Behind the theater, the math didn’t add up: the city generated 45,000 cubic meters of waste a month but collected only 37,000. Equipment failures, unpaid contractors, and mismanagement compounded the mess.

“It’s always reactive — patch one hole, another opens,” said environmental advocate Pat Jared Pangantihon. 

The 2026 budget’s token allocation for Clenro, he warned, ensures “we’ll be back here again next year, only with more trash.”

A city coughing through its recovery

In the same weeks garbage festered, the city’s clinics overflowed. 

Influenza-like illnesses surged nine percent year-on-year; Lapasan alone logged 132 cases by mid-October. Water-borne infections flared after heavy rains, and dengue shadowed every household.

The City Health Office — granted its biggest budget yet — vowed to hire more doctors, restock clinics, and expand vaccination drives. Mayor Uy promised transparency and “measurable results.”

But money can’t fix every ailment. 

Many seniors skipped their free flu shots. Clinics in flood-prone barangays remained short on staff. 

“It’s good they’re investing in health,” one community nurse said, “but what we need is reach — people on the ground, not just announcements.”

The irony lingers: the city can afford new hospital wings, yet not enough medics to fill them.

Roads to somewhere, eventually

Infrastructure, the administration’s crown jewel, commands more than a billion pesos. Flood-control projects are advancing; the Department of Public Works recently completed a P160-million structure in Barangay Puntod.

But for many Kagay-anons, promises have yet to reach the pavement. 

The much-hyped Rio de Oro Boulevard — built to decongest downtown traffic — remains largely closed, two years after inauguration. Meant to carry 40,000 vehicles daily, it serves joggers and Zumba dancers instead.

City engineers say connecting roads aren’t ready. Commuters call it incompetence. 

“A brand-new road you can’t drive on — that’s classic Kagay-an,” quipped a jeepney driver who passes the locked gates daily.

Other projects, too, have stalled amid questions of necessity or consultation. 

A proposed pedestrian overpass near Masterson Avenue schools sparked protests for lack of study. Each delay erodes public faith in the city’s billion-peso “Build” mantra.

Can money buy governance?

As the City Council weighs the budget line by line, the question is no longer how much Cagayan de Oro spends — but whether it learns.

The mayor’s team promises quarterly progress reports and civil-society oversight. Council leaders vow scrutiny. Yet residents have heard these vows before.

The woman dodging trash piles on her morning commute wants garbage collected before the mayor’s photo op.

The health worker logging dengue cases wants vaccines that arrive before the outbreak.

The driver sweating in traffic wants the river road opened, not just mentioned in speeches.

The numbers may be historic.

But until the city’s billions translate into cleaner streets, safer clinics, and open roads, they remain what they’ve long been in Cagayan de Oro — figures on a page, waiting to be believed.