By Mortz C. Ortigoza
Major news magazines and newspapers
printed in Imperial Manila have news about the newly acknowledged Guinness
World Record’s tallest steel framed and engineered bamboo panels’ Saint
Vincent Ferrer statue in Bayambang, Pangasinan.
Their news features jibe with the
Holy Week as Filipinos went to their provinces and spend the long religious
holidays and weekends there.
I will not talk about religion here
since I’m not competent about it. The only verses in the Bible I could memorize
is John 3:16 and the other one whenever I quaffed a half glass
alcohol contained 80 proof 750 ml Tanduay and White Castle in high school and
college's “Verseculo Baso Kapitulo E.S.Q“.
E.S.Q is Extra Smooth Quality as
come - on by Tanduay to young but poor drinkers like me.
I’m going to talk about the
economics opportunity for the people created by local government units like the
town of Bayambang to attract tourists to visit the historic town. The town was 5th
Capital of the Revolutionary Philippine Republic during the Filipino – American
War in 1899.
Last week I wrote about Bayambang
under the administration of business tycoon and Mayor Cezar T. Quiambao as one
of the top four richest first class towns in the 44 towns and four cities’
Pangasinan.
“We have PhP506 million budget this year where some come from the disposal of assets in Magsaysay,” he told the crowd from the public and private sectors who witnessed the inauguration of the proposed LGU housing project to be given to municipal hall’s employees in Barangay Bical Sur of the burgeoning town.
Quiambao told reporters that every
year his family controlled corporations like Stradcom and other businesses
like a mall pay more than PhP 80 million of their taxes in the
municipality.
Even the PhP250 million price tagged of the 50.23-meter statue to commemorate the 400th year of the establishment of Saint Vincent Ferrer Parish in Bayambang and the 600th death anniversary of the saint on April 5, 2019 was personally paid by Quiambao and his gorgeous wife actress Mary Clare Judith Phyllis “NiƱa” Jose-Quiambao, the multiplier effects that can be created by the mammoth statute could be incomparable.
“Attention: there is NO
entrance fee to go inside and around the Prayer Park. FYI. Thank you, God bless
you all,” I saw the post of Mrs. Jose- Quiambao at her
Facebook account.
The surge of people who motor
to the pilgrims’ town like those vacationers who will make side trip in
Bayambang from their Manila to Baguio City’s rendezvous, will be a spark
plugged for more franchisees to own Jollibee, McDonald, Mang Inasal, Starbucks,
Dunkin Donut, Yellow Cab Taxi, hotels, banks, gas stations, malls, and others
to put shop there. That could spike employment in the town and even the
province of Pangasinan and more business and real property taxes for the LGU.
The Saint Vincent statue will be a
rival to The Minor Basilica of Our Lady of the Most Holy Rosary of
Manaoag perched on the hilly part of the tiny town Manaoag whose
narrow streets are bane to pilgrims from various places of the country who have
to wiggle out to the traffic congestion as they look for parking spaces of
their cars.
Parking in the streets there are
welcome sight for the personnel of the local government as they aggressively
billed motorists whose pay go to the coffer of the municipality.
The surrounding areas of the Saint
Vincent Prayer Park in Barangay Bani are still sparsely populated as I used to
pass in a car from Dagupan City and the lighter traffic routes via Barangay
Manat in Binmaley, San Carlos City, and the probably fifth class poor town of
Basista whenever I was rushing to beat the time for the start of the the press
conferences called by the mayor at his well-secured sprawling mansion in a
village there.
Tourist and pilgrim magnet had been
created by the City of Alaminos, Pangasinan under the watch of Mayor Art
Celeste. I learned that before he became a mayor to the city that host the
famous Hundred Islands, the LGU there collected only PhP5 million a year
revenues from tourists who used the boats in visiting those pristine beaches
and idyllic islets there. When Celeste became mayor I saw a post a news article
that the City had collected P43.19 million from 547,412 visitors who
visited the Hundred Islands National Park last year after the mayor spruced up
the Lucap Bay’s wharf and improved the facilities there and those islands, and
the construction of the 56-foot statue of Christ the Savior atop
Pilgrimage Island (formerly Martha Island).
That’s 1000 percent spike for the
fees collected from sightseers that included foreigners carried by huge cruise
ships that ply the global routes!
Another fourth class local
government unit in the mountainous area of Eastern Pangasinan had its mayor
conceptualized and constructed for the town to manage the Balungao Hilltop
Adventure.
The zipline there is the longest in
Region 1. It offers too ATV Riding, Hiking, Mountain
Climbing, Mountain Biking, Trail Walking, Trust Fall, Hot
and Cold Swimming Pools, and Bungee Trampoline.
I read before that yearly, the LGU
of Balungao earned Php10 million extra revenues for those sights.
Those extra monies, before the eyes
of a political and economics kibitzers, are comparative advantages to pay for
more medicines, doctors, nurses, and repairs of public school buildings to
serve the under privileged in that poor town.
Despite earning more than PhP 10 million from the bangus or milkfish cages and the PhP 200 million a year, the small 37,000 populated mountainous western Pangasinan town mayor of Sual mulls for the Balungao town’s come ons to further spike his local government coffer that has a budget of P350 million for this year.
“Each of the 32 farmer
associations were given three kuligligs or small tractors, subsidized certified
hybrid seeds, organic and chemical fertilizers, motorized water pumps, and ten
big tractors to lessen their expenses but swell their income every harvest,” he told me about the advantages of an LGU that has wherewithal.
Arcinue moreover cited that each of
his 19 villages had been given a brand new Toyota L-300 utility van to help the
community, 12 brand new mini-dump trucks for the use of the barangays, a newly
constructed 10 bed rooms hospital with one doctor and two consultant doctors to
boot and three more surgeons to be hired, free medicines to his constituents,
almost all roads in the town proper and villages are paved and concretized, 45%
of the huge yearly budget goes to the salaries of this LGU’s workers where a
job – order employee receives P355 a day and the department head gets P70,000
monthly in regular pay and allowances.
Many LGUs in the Philippines like
those fourth and fifth class towns could only collect PhP 5 million a year
business and real property taxes from its constituents who were too poor to pay
their taxes because shops and jobs are scarce in the area.
Thanks for the distribution
of national revenues from the national government that these poor towns
received an annual Internal Revenue Allotment (IRA) that runs to P50 million or
more as it depends on the number of the population there and the size of the
LGU’s area as based on the Local Government Code.
Even cities in the Philippines
hosted other businesses that help increase their budget.
Mayor Amadeo ”Bobom” Perez IV
told me in 2013 that aside from his city receiving hundreds of millions of
pesos from the national government, it had “a goose that lays the
golden eggs” through the Urdaneta City University that gave the city’s
extra PhP100 million yearly from the competitive tuition fees paid by the
students that hailed from the eight towns and one city’s Fifth Congressional
District.
Mayor Bobom explained that
UCU used to give the city coffer PhP 200 million a year but because of the
slump in the demand for Filipino nurses abroad the university delivered
only more than P100 million to the city treasury a year.
When I was in Mindanao two weeks
ago, I ruffled some feathers of some people there because I wrote on my blog
that North Cotabato Province or Province of Cotabato is the No. 1 poorest
province in Region 12 while it was No. 7 in the 81 provinces in the country
based on the Top 10 Provinces with the Most Number of Poor Families by the 2015
Philippines Statistics Authority. In the 2018 PSA data that was published last
week the rustic province was still considered with the most numbers of poor
households.
“Why not the leaders
there emulate how mayors in Luzon had done to draw people to visit their town
and spend monies there?” I posed to
myself.
Look at Tarlac City, it used to be
called pee center by travelers from Manila to Baguio City and to Ilocos Norte
and vice versa because the town used to be stopover of air conditioned and
ordinary buses.
But when the LGU and some residents
there like the Cojuangcos transformed the town into an economic zone, Tarlac
became one of the richest city (city hood was in April 18, 1998) in Central and
Northern Luzon areas with probably two billion pesos or more in annual
appropriation budget (AAB).
Daley
Dan Pasion, representative of Sumitomo, said the award winning Japanese firm
started amid the Asian Currency Crisis in 1991 with 6,000 workers mostly
assembling cars’ wiring harness around the world for Toyota, Honda, Mazda and
vehicles like Kawasaki.
“Without
us the vehicles would not switch and run,” he quipped.
He
said 90% of its employees based on its plant in Barangay San Miguel, Tarlac are
high school graduates.
He
cited that 6,000 workers multiplied by five in a nuclear family means 30,000
probable consumers in the market.
Each of the workers there received a daily wage above the minimum wage law.
Each of the workers there received a daily wage above the minimum wage law.
“Because
of us, Tarlac first saw its first McDonald,” he told the crowd during the Luzon Ecozone Summit held at the Stadia in Dagupan City
The
Luisita Industrial Parks’ Special Export Processing Zone there hosted
corporations like URC, Centro Techno Park, Philippine Long Distance Telephone,
and others.
With its present PhP1.10 billion AAB,
Dagupan City, the richest city in the nine cities’ Region-1, did not contend
herself to collect those business and real property taxes from those thriving
business establishments. Mayor Belen T. Fernandez spearheaded the approval of
the economic zone in the city by government offices like the Philippine
Economic Zone Authority (PEZA) for the city to host in a 1000 hectares of land
at the Pantal-Lucao Area foreign and local investors like Filinvest, Ayala
Project Estates, SM Properties, Megaworld Construction and Development
Cooperation, and others that already bought lands there because of the tax
holidays and other perks a zone offers.
The mayor told me before that an Information
Technology - Business Process Management like call centers at the
economic zone could employ five thousand direct jobs in the city and even those
towns and cities in the province whose workers have to go to other provinces
with zones and in Imperial Manila to look for job and employment.
‘Nough said!
I hope this article can be an eye
opener for mayors, members of the Sanggunian Bayan and Panlungsod, and the
business associations to think what income generating projects they can
apply to spike their budget and boost the self-respect and pride of their people
because of the jobs being generated to them
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