By Pet Melliza/The Beekeeper
The next administration will have its hand full wiggling Iloilo
City off the debt trap that past and current regimes plunged us into, according
to “councilorable” Dwight Trasadas.
The quagmire has shot above P1 B and all that the administration
does to repay its obligations is raise taxes.
The city in 2001 under Mayor Mansueto Malabor floated bonds
worth P125 million with Philippine National Bank (PNB) as conduit, to construct
low-cost houses for city employees.
Malabor returned to civilian life in July 2001 without the
chance to start any of the 413 housing units.
His successor Jerry Trenas failed
to finish any in all nine years in office. Barely a year in his first term, 2002,
a contractor blew the whistle: he and fellow subcontractors used substandard
materials because their principal, Ace Builders Enterprises, failed to pay them
accordingly.
Ace Builders abandoned the project throwing Trenas to
catatonic inaction. He did not badger the contractor nor seize its surety
bonds. The unfinished houses were cannibalized.
City taxpayers lost not only P125 million in capital. For
some reasons, the prime suspect in the “Pavia Housing Scam”, Trenas, changed
the nature of debenture, from bonds to direct loan, transferring from the PNB
as conduit to Philippine Veterans’ Bank (PVB) as lender.
The transition cost the city P12 million more, swelling its
debt to P137 million.
Trenas was elected to congress in May 2010. Before he moved
up, he incurred P460 million in loan to construct a new seven-story city hall.
He bequeathed to his successor, Jed Patrick Mabilog, a mere skeletal structure
but with a balance of P60 million.
Mabilog took less than a year to balloon the city’s
indebtedness by P90 million allegedly to acquire heavy equipment for the city’s
open dumpsite at Brgy. Calajunan, Mandurriao.
The next year, 2011, Mabilog contracted another debt to the
tune of P260 M to complete the city hall sans public bidding. In all, the new
city hall costs a total P720 million in loans, suspected to be overpriced with
floor area of roughly 14,000 square meters.
Trasadas sees that the succeeding administration, whether
that of reelectionist Mabilog or challenger Rommel Ynion, will be scraping the
bottom of the barrel implementing fresh projects and repaying debts.
Lately, Mabilog resumed the binge by borrowing another P290
million from Land Bank to transform the Calajunan open dumpsite into a sanitary
landfill.
Mabilog is bent on raising taxes despite opposition from
businessmen like Trasadas who believe that the city can increase its revenues
without need for tax hikes: its tax base has been expanding like subdivisions and
buildings mushrooming all over the city.
This is elementary: if the city’s taxpayers increase to 200
from the previous year’s 100, it simply means that its income grew 100 percent
without even raising real property tax by a single centavo, based on the
presumption that each taxpayer pay a uniform amount.
Should it be Ynion winning the mayoral race, this space
proffers an unsolicited advice of investigating how the city’s loans were
spent. It must further look into the scandalous racket called “Perimeter
Boundary Ordinance” (PBO) which solved everything except the traffic mess in
the city.
The Trenas administration mesmerized us in 2007 with the
superstition blaming provincial jeepneys for traffic gridlocks. His successor
perpetuated that dogma in cahoots with pseudo transport leaders.
The PBO calls
for the construction of private terminals in the outskirts where provincial
jeepneys and buses are to drop off passengers and cargoes, and wait for their
turns to proceed to the city proper.
The PBO considers passengers transported from the towns “theirs”,
that is, they have no choice but take only city loop jeepneys to reach the city
proper from the terminals.
PBO terminals, bedeviled by poor amenities, mulct passenger vehicles
P20 each minimum every passage. “Donation boxes” guard the entrances of their restrooms
charging P2 each entry.
Not a single centavo collected by private terminal operators
reaches the city coffer as share from the lopsided partnership that fails in its
purpose of solving traffic snarls.
Contrast that to Passi City’s modern bus terminal which gives it exclusive income from
terminating public vehicles and passengers using its restrooms.
(The Iloilo City Terminal Market or Super Market used to be the hub terminals of all provincial public vehicles. The PBO is supposed to decongest it. The things there are nowadays: the congestion has become even worse. The PBO cleared it of mobile obstruction in the first few days. Soon, the four streets surrounding the Super Market have become a bedlam of terminals, "ukay-ukay" stands, talyer or vehicle repair shops, junkyard, makeshift bodegas, and what-have-you. One has to wiggle his/her vehicle through these obstructions.)
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