What residents of Barangay Cabaroan, Piddig, Ilocos Norte are seeing today is not a bridge, but concrete piles rising from a river, even as government records show a P28.46-million project phase booked as “completed.”

The project is located in Barangay Cabaroan, Piddig, Ilocos Norte, which forms part of the province's First Congressional District represented by House Majority Leader Rep. Ferdinand Alexander "Sandro" Marcos III.

Listed under DPWH program code 25AA0294 through the Convergence and Special Support Program, the project has been flagged online as a “ghost project.” Official documents reviewed by the DAILY TRIBUNE show it is not fictitious, but they also explain why public suspicion has persisted.

The contractor is North Tech Builders and Construction Supply, which received about P25.6 million, or 90 percent of the contract amount, between March and September. Roughly P2.8 million remains unpaid. The declared output covers 10 sets of bored pile foundations forming the bridge substructure. There is no deck, no span, and no usable crossing.

A confidential DPWH status report nonetheless marks the foundation phase as “100 percent completed,” with no issues noted, even though the project remains non-functional until future phases are funded and built.

This is where the controversy deepens, because North Tech is not just any contractor.

An earlier investigation by Rappler identified North Tech as the third-largest DPWH contractor in Piddig since 2016, with P372.3 million worth of projects in the municipality. Rappler reported that the company is owned by Maribeth Salazar, wife of Piddig Vice Mayor Edwin Salazar and sister-in-law of Eddie Guillen, a presidential appointee of President Ferdinand Marcos Jr. and current administrator of the National Irrigation Administration.

Guillen’s office has denied any intervention in procurement, citing the government's decentralized bidding system. However, governance experts quoted by Rappler argued that conflicts of interest do not always reveal themselves through signatures, particularly when contractors linked to political families repeatedly secure projects in their own jurisdictions.

DPWH-linked sources told the DAILY TRIBUNE that the Cabaroan–Libnaoan Bridge is part of a multi-year development plan, meaning additional funding is required before the bridge can be completed. This technical explanation, however, collides with public reality: funds are released early while communities wait years for usable infrastructure.

The optics are further intensified by broader spending patterns in northern Luzon. Alleged fiscal year 2025 budget data circulated publicly by Batangas Rep. Leandro Leviste show that the district represented by Sandro Marcos received P12.91 billion, the largest allocation in the region, reinforcing perceptions that areas associated with the Marcos political base remain priority recipients of state-funded projects.

Officially, the Cabaroan project is not a ghost project. But neither is it a bridge. What stands instead is a familiar Philippine paradox: a project declared complete, most of the funds already released, and a community still waiting for the infrastructure it was promised.