Baguio Insider gets comments like “I hope this causes the downfall of the Bautista regime” and I cannot fault the site visitors, residents and visitors both, from feeling this way. Like many, I am dismayed by what is happening to what remains a quaint little town only in the minds of those who remember the place when it was truly clean and the most beautiful place in the Philippines.
On the other hand, I want to make it clear, that one of the reasons I write what I write is precisely because I want the local government to SUCCEED!
I wish for the local government to be able to provide us with a clean city, superb education for the children, beautiful parks and gardens, a good business climate for those who provide good products and service (nothing like those awfully unimaginative cellphone accessory shops, satellite markets and ukay-ukay stalls strewn all over the city), well-lit and safe streets, wide sidewalks, clean air — basic services mostly, which is really their primary duty to provide.
It is only after they are able to ensure a good quality of life for the residents that they should enter into those city ‘money-making schemes’ or ‘development plans’ that they are planning — like developing Botanical Garden, or building more flyovers, or a palengke in Burnham Park.
They will argue, “But Baguio needs the money!” The city will earn the money through business taxes, and permits galore. Heck, it should even strive to collect the correct amounts from the residents for their community tax certificates, because a lot of these people are using the city resources for free.
Although the city has the right to go into business for itself, it is better if they first ensure a good business climate and step in only in areas where there is a vacuum.
Our local government is so unimaginative it only wants to collect rent for the streets (night markets), Burnham Park (multi-level parking building with palengke), Mines View Park (shopping mall). People, there;s more to life than retail trade!
You see, the reason we have to ensure the local government’s success is because, if it fails, the politicians will not be the losers — it’ll be Baguio City itself. And you and me right along with it, dear reader.
The politicians have already caused so much damage with their mismanagement of the city since the 1990 earthquake — by encouraging migration and squatters by making the city squalid, by giving preferential treatment (like 5-years of ‘no business taxes’) to SM City Baguio which, although pretty enough, has caused the closure of so many mom and pop operations in the city, by allowing a myriad of sari-sari stores to sell liquor so we have all those gin-drinkers all over our streets, or by failing to regulate the safety of the students in those heavily-congested school buildings, or by allowing the gangs to go wild in our streets with their knives, guns and spray paint.
Then there was the hyping up of a few incidents of meninggoceccemia to ‘epidemic’ proportions that caused so many people to actually fear the city.
I am not talking merely about the present administration that has two whole years more of ruining the city’s landscape if we allow them to.
But at the same time, I cannot support programs instituted by this current administration that will cause the city to turn into a clone of Quiapo or Morayta, or those projects that are not only whimsical, ill-intentioned or impulsive, but also those that are egotistic or driven by personal greed. I also reject something that a majority of Filipinos now accept — that “politics is business.”
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