CSF dishonors Oscar Rodriguez

ON MONDAY, Feb. 26, in what can be the culmination of the celebration of its Kaganapan 2024, the city government “bestowed upon San Fernando’s ‘Cityhood Heroes’ a day of recognition to honor ‘their significant contributions in the Cityhood journey.’”

“Leading the roster of awardees was former Mayor and Congressman Dr. Jesus Reynaldo “Rey” Aquino, who spent a certain three years of his life as a local chief executive campaigning non-stop in the Congress and the Senate for San Fernando’s cityhood.” So read the post in the social media page of the city information office, naming some significant others who were accorded due recognition.

“Atty. Oscar Rodriguez, who likewise served as San Fernando Mayor and Pampanga Third District Congressman, was also one of the awardees…” the post noted. Thereby, the city government utterly dishonored Rodriguez; relegating him to a mere footnote of the history he himself crafted.

Oscar Samson Rodriguez did not merely serve as city mayor and Pampanga 3^rd District congressman but can rightfully claim paternity over the cityhood of San Fernando.

Short in memory – it has been only 23 years since, and long in ignorance is the city government of an epochal instance in the history of San Fernando. It ought to hang its head in shame!

Against the caution of a well-meaning friend who said the collective intelligence at city hall today could be contained on the head of a pin, hence the futility of any discussion, I would still share this definitive narrative on the cityhood saga of San Fernando lifted from my book Oca: A Story of Struggle published in 2005.  

Fathering the City

ABORTED BY the threat of lahar after its very conception in 1995, miscarried – induced by the financial crisis – in 1997, and stillborn because of the 1998 elections. That was the wringer the dream of cityhood for Pampanga’s capital town went through.

“But for the persistence and dogged determination of Congressman Oscar S. Rodriguez, there would have been no birthing to the City of San Fernando,” says Redgie Salas-Szal, a member of the legislative staff that prepared the paperwork for cityhood.

Soon as the din of the 1995 elections died down, Oca, fresh from electoral victory, took with characteristic boldness the preparatory steps to the realization of his dream by immediately buckling down to work in preparing the bill at the House of Representatives to start the municipality’s campaign for cityhood.

Disaster came in October that year, with lahar rampages that buried Barrio Cabalantian, Bacolor and hit San Pedro Cutud, Sto. Nino, San Juan and threatened the very center of San Fernando.

The exigency of San Fernando’s very survival took paramouncy, and the preparations for the cityhood bill had to be shelved, albeit temporarily.

Battling, if not belittling the scepticism of national government officials – they that cried to “let nature take its course”” and called for the abandonment of the province – Oca maximized his efforts in saving Pampanga and San Fernando from the onslaught of lahar, mobilizing citizen participation in lobbying government for engineering interventions. The FVR Megadike stands today as a solid testament to these efforts.

Towards the end of 1996, when the province was assured of relative safety from lahar, Oca picked up anew the pursuit of cityhood. Alas, lack of support from the municipal government took the wind out of the cityhood sails.

Priority was still anti-lahar infrastructure and flood-mitigating measures. The all-important requirements for cityhood took the back seat in the municipal government. Eventually, the cityhood bill gathered dust at the House Committee on Local Government where it was referred after its filing.

Then in January 1997, intense pressure from a cross-section of the San Fernando community prodded the Sangguniang Bayan to pass Resolution No. 97-001 – sponsored by Councilors Eduardo Quiambao and Ceferino Laus – requesting the Congress of the Philippine through Rep. Oscar S. Rodriguez to convert the municipality of San Fernando into a component city.

A separate resolution for the Senate was unanimously approved by the SB a month later.

On April 23, 1997, Oca filed HB9267, “An Act Converting the Municipality of San Fernando into a Component City to be known as the City of San Fernando.”

But as the cityhood movement gained renewed momentum, the election season came. And as is the way of things in the Philippines, everything stops to give way to politics. Cityhood was lost in the cacophony of the election campaign.

Still, Oca would not just be denied: of his re-election, and his cityhood dream. He lost no time refiling the cityhood bill as HB1397, this time ensuring that the municipal government met all the prerequisites for cityhood, starting with the town’s barangay councils passing resolutions “strongly” endorsing the transformation of San Fernando into a city.

In a letter on July 6, 1998, Mayor Rey Aquino urged the SB to pass a resolution endorsing the conversion of the municipality into a city. Two short days after, Resolution No. 98-001, sponsored by Councilor Dennis Dizon, was unanimously approved. The cityhood resolution was endorsed to the Sangguniang Panlalawigan which subsequently made its own endorsement.       

San Fernando had no problem in meeting the other prerequisites to cityhood. It had a minimum population of 193,000 inhabitants at that time as certified by the National Statistics Office and the latest annual registered income of at least P53 million, based on 1998 prices as certified by the Department of Finance.

Oca very well knew that with cityhood, San Fernando’s annual income would further improve and basic services to the Fernandinos would be greatly enhanced.

Aside from the additional income and expanded services, Oca saw in the city greater local autonomy and lesser supervision from the national government. And the subsequent, if not consequent, independence from the province as a highly urbanized city and its entitlement to a separate legislative district in Congress.

For his part, Mayor Aquino formed an ad-hoc committee with Engr. Mike Quizon as head, and then started a town-wide cityhood information drive.

And then a new setback: the penny-pinching policy of the new Estrada administration dictated by international financial institutions for the country to cope with the Asian financial crisis.

Budgetary constraints forced the House of Representatives to suspend all impending conversion of municipalities into cities. Oca’s bill was not spared from the freezer; the city of his dream, on-hold in suspended animation.

But Oca’s tough-as-nails persistence just would not give up. Drawing from the wellspring of goodwill he cultivated through his years in Congress, and with the evangelical zeal of a Dominican on his first foreign mission, Oca moved his peers to see and share his dream. On third and final reading, March 9, 1999, the House approved HB6766 converting the municipality of San Fernando into a component city.

Transmitted to the Senate and presented to public hearing by the Senate Majority Floor Leader at the Senate Committee on Local Government, it took all of 13 days for Senate Bill No. 2192 converting the Municipality of San Fernando into a city to be approved.

On January 5, 2001, a historic event took place in Malacanang Palace upon the signing of Republic Act No. 8990 by His Excellency, President Joseph E. Estrada, creating the independent component city of San Fernando.

But the birthing pains persisted.

The usually warring local politicians, vested interest groups and cause-oriented militants succeeded in forming a tenuous alliance to mount opposition to San Fernando’s cityhood. Their main arguments of increased taxes, prohibitive social costs and dreary urban blights did not dull the sheen of cosmopolitan appeal of a San Fernando City. Never mind the “No more flooding, Yes to cityhood” inanity of the Mayor Aquino campaign.

Thus, in what amounted to a perfect preview of the May 2001 elections, the cityhood was ratified in the plebiscite of February 4, 2001 – and its father, Oca is given his just and due recognition.

YES, IT does not take too much intelligence to know this milestone in the city’s history. Not unless yours is that of a gnat.

Taking trikes off highways again, again, again

LAST WEEK, the Department of the Interior and Local Government press released its Memorandum Circular No. 2023-195 dated Dec. 6, 2023 enjoining local government units to undertake the reinforcement of the prohibition of tricycles, pedicabs, and motorized pedicabs on national highways.

A recurrent refrain from the DILG there displaying its abject failure at imposing its will on the LGUs.

Only in the previous dispensation, there was then-Interior Secretary Eduardo M. Año issuing a similar order, to wit: ““For safety reasons, no tricycle or pedicab should operate on national highways utilized by four-wheel vehicles greater than four tons and where normal speed exceeds 40 kilometers per hour.”

Año’s DILG Advisory No. 2019-0016 is but an iteration of DILG Memo Circular 2007-001, which in turn sprang out of Section 10 of Presidential Letter of Instruction No. 1482 Series of 1985 – harking back to Marcosian times – that tricycles are “prohibited to operate along the national highway or any road which allows maximum speed of more than 40kph, especially on well-paved, high-speed roads, unless special tricycle/bicycle lanes on the shoulder are provided, except to cross.”

Yeah, that is how long has this prohibition been ordered. And here I am, ranting and raving just as long at the inutility of all DILG orders putting trikes in their proper places.

Still, trikes lord over the highways – not to mention even the rural dirt roads and urban alleyways. Truly, they are the kings of the road.

A constant in all DILG orders: “Allowing them on main thoroughfares poses hazards to other motor vehicles, the riding public, and even to the drivers themselves.”

Hazards on the road, everyone knows that. Not the least the trike drivers themselves. Still, on any day, any hour of the day in fact:

Tricycles traverse stretches of the national highways in direct violation of the law, being confined only to crossing them.

Tricycles keep to the innermost – and therefore, fast – lane at processional speed holding traffic and raising blood pressures of drivers behind them.

At other times, tricycles – especially the lowered sporty types – turn the national highway into an Indianapolis 5000, unmindful of all other vehicles.

Tricycles are loaded to the roof with passengers and goods as they ply their merry way along the major roads and highways.

Tricycles have made street corners, many times even whole streets as their terminals, complete with sheds and karaokes.   

Include in this group too the padyak-sikels who virtually hold proprietary rights over city streets – making terminals atop bridges, counterflowing traffic at will, do pick-and-drop passengers wherever, whenever.

Want to undertake a study of anarchy in Pampanga’s principal cities?

Go downtown San Fernando from 6:30 in the evening onward and drive through a maze of jeepneys, tricycles and tri-wheelers parked, idling or slowly moving in all directions, in utter contempt of the right of way.

Personally, I have had three brushes with tricycles – each time I am on the right side of the law, but ending up just the same paying for the damages on my cars which ran to tens of thousands of pesos. The trike driver always going scot-free. Little, if perverse, consolation to me that on two occasions, the tricycles were total wrecks. ‘Dana.   

How did this come to pass?

Blame the laxity of law enforcers rising out of their fellowship – in Tagalog, kapalagayang-loob – with the drivers as members of the same socio-economic class.

Blame the timidity of local government units to enforce the law in view of the “solid votes” of the TODAs and JODAs. Which, in actuality, is more myth than might.

Blame that all too ready scapegoat for everything wrong in this country – the culture of impunity. As I extracted from an old piece here (Immunity index, June 21, 2012):   

Culturization though starts small, petty things, which often repeated, graduate to big things. Like the culture of the lie attributed to Goebbels: If a lie is repeated often enough, it becomes the truth.

Hence, if a wrong is done often enough, it becomes not necessarily right, but altogether tolerated, aye accepted as a no-wrong…

…[Jeepney and tricycle drivers] flout the law with nothing more than their stupid grins to flaunt, but nobody dares apprehend them. Not even reprimand them. And these are but the “small folk” far below the ladder of power and influence in local society.

If, in their “lowness” they can get away with these small violations, so can the high and the mighty get away with bigger violations…

…Ending the culture of impunity in this country should be invoked at each unpunished illegality, no matter how seemingly trivial.

Ending the culture of impunity in this country demands the draconian exercise of political will. By all persons in authority. With full respect to the rights of the people, but of course.

Will. Will not. A whale of a difference in the nut.

And we all know who’s that.