It's P1 billion, moron

IS IT mere happenstance, or does it come exclusively to being a city, and immediately prior to election time?

This sudden surge of edifice complex most manifest among the chief executives of Pampanga’s twin cities of its American past – Angeles and Mabalacat.

Pursuant to his vision to “make Mabalacat a model city not only in Region 3 but in the whole Philippines,” Mayor Crisostomo Garbo is headlined as “eyeing” a new municipal hall. So was press released last week, and immediately ridiculed by some local wordsmiths as retrogression, thus: Siyudad ne ing Mabalacat, nanung linub qng quiquintab nang buntuc Garbo obat buri ne pang ibalic queng panga-municipalidad?

A city hall is to a city. A municipal hall is to a municipality. Mabalacat is a city, therefore…Garbo is not exactly wrong with a municipal hall as apple of his eye for his city. The adjective “municipal” used in its meaning “of or relating to a city or town that has its own local government.” Go, check its entry in the Cambridge and Collins dictionaries. Semantics though is the least of the issues obtaining from Garbo’s scheme.

“We are planning to purchase two out of the six-hectare lot of a private owner. The lot is worth P400 million. Then, we will construct a municipal hall worth P600 million with complete facilities and equipment. It is now on the drawing board and the plan is now being finalized,” so was Garbo quoted.

Funding for the P1-billion expense, Garbo said, will be sourced from a bank loan. Which bank, it was not said. He hastened to assure though that the LGU had the capacity to pay, citing the upturn in the city budget of over P700 million annually, and an IRA of P1.7 billion and still counting year after year.   

Swell, so where’s the Mabalaqueno’s beef?

For one, the target location – right beside the San Rafael Church along MacArthur Highway fronting Mary Help of Christians School of Mabalacat and a spit away from the SCTEx-NLEx ingress-egress – is already a traffic trap.

Two, the current city hall – the Delfin S. Lee Building – at Xevera-Mabalacat is barely 10 years old, still new by building standards. Not to mention its more spacious surroundings, and over 100 meters off the national highway.

If it ain’t broke, why fix it? The naysayers contend.

Misprioritization that can only lead to misappropriation of valuable, even if not scant, financial resources resulting to disservice to the public. So is Garbo’s gambit widely, if not, indeed, wisely considered.    

In similar, earlier, straits was – and still is – Mayor Edgardo Pamintuan with Angeles City securing a P1.025-billion loan from the Development Bank of the Philippines as “funding for the construction of the new city hall, sports complex, multi-level steel parking, and other related capital expenditures.”

“Totally inconsiderate,” mayoral aspirant Alexander Cauguiran decried the city’s action and demanded the city government “stop all these projects as no award has yet been made.”

Lecturing: “The mayor and vice mayor must first address the basic priority needs of the city and its residents, to provide better medical and health services, and expand opportunities for free college education, before constructing these modern facilities.”

Pointing to the urgency, indeed the emergency, that is the case of the Ospital ning Angeles and the primacy of the City College of Angeles among the most pressing needs of the Angeleno.  

Damning outright: “Spending public funds for the construction of grandiose project before the immediate need of people is a failure of public policy and flaw in good governance.”

But ain’t it a priority to replace the antiquated city hall – constructed at the time of Antonio Abad Santos (1988-1992) – with a spanking new one befitting the status of a world class mayor, and instill a pride of place among the citizens? Besides, it will certainly draw lots of tourists, someone in the city council said.

So, Cauguiran’s choking on his own bile? Whatever, the P1.025-billion loan and its ramifications have fueled the engine of his campaign, now nearly at full throttle.

In what could be a renascence of their twinning from their US bases past, Angeles and Mabalacat are unified in one defining issue in this election, in a paraphrase of Bill Clinton circa 1992: It’s the P1 billion, moron.

Whither goeth the political fortune of the partylist running Pamintuan – and by extension his anointed assumptive successor Bryan Matthew Nepomuceno – and the re-electing Garbo starts from there. Or ends, right there.

P1 billion. Catch the drift. Do the math. Better yet, fractionalize. It does not take a genius to figure this out.