By Mortz C. Ortigoza

Pangasinan Rep. Maria Rachel Arenas (third district) said that it was not the vaunted P720 million worth of projects that she unloaded in her district in her barely two years in office that people there would remember her but her ubiquity and accessibility to them.

“What is the use of those hundreds of millions of projects if your constituents could not even confide personally their problems to their congressman?” she asked.

The neophyte solon – whose enviable access to public funds because of her being part of the “sanctum-sanctorum” of President Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo – has just arrived from her recent official sojourn with the president in a four-country swing in Europe, Middle East, and the United States.

The Harvard-educated Arenas disproved rumors that 2007 congressional election rivals Atty. Gallant Soriano and Generoso Tulagan Jr. had placed first and second, respectively, while she slid down to the third place in the latest recount of votes her rivals had lodged at the main office of the Commission on Elections in Manila.

“That’s the disinformation my opponents peddled in my district. There’s no truth to that. The recounting has already been concluded, and I led the contest with even more than a thousand votes ahead of my closest rival,” said Arenas, who defeated Tulagan with a margin of more than 900 votes.

But with the phenomenally historical more than half-a-billion worth of projects she has already delivered at her district, some political observers said that she would be a formidable force to reckon with in the 2010 congressional poll.

A congressman usually receives only P70 million pesos worth of projects dubbed as the Priority Development Assistant Fund every year.