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Thursday, November 24, 2005
Barangay bingo illegal: mayor
By Ernie N. Olson Jr.
BAGUIO City Mayor Braulio Yaranon Wednesday declared as unlawful the barangay bingo raffles, which had been operated on-and-off by a group of barangay chairmen and a private company in the city the past days.
Yaranon admitted that although barangays are authorized by law to raise funds for their own projects, "bingo games, as provided for under Presidential Decree (PD) 1602, is still illegal. There is no way to change that."
A Sun.Star source said operation of the bingo raffles were temporarily suspended again last Saturday after Diamond Pacific, the private company contracted to provide initial cash prizes and funding for operational expenses, failed to fully pay a P340,000 cash prize supposedly won by a bettor sometime last week.
Another source said the failure to pay the amount might be due to the huge expense incurred by the chairman of Diamond Pacific after his two-month old grandson was hospitalized over a week ago. The child died in the hospital days later.
The barangay bingo raffles, conducted similarly to the Bingo 2-Ball, started operations in Baguio with the alleged backing of several barangay officials last month.
Although not fully operational in all of the city's 128 barangays yet, Barangay Trancoville Chairman Albert Della said some 40 barangay councils have already passed their respective resolutions in support of the bingo raffles.
"Although this is still being done on a random and experimental basis now, we hope to make this fully-operational by the end of this year," he said. "This concept of lottery is designed to raise funds for barangay development projects, and in the process, combat and eradicate illegal number games like jueteng, which does not provide any public benefit," he added.
Della said "the proceeds to be generated in the raffles have been decided to be partitioned to all barangays on the policy of equal sharing."
He added that although local government units (LGUs) like barangays were authorized to source out additional revenues through fund-raising activities in 1991 by Republic Act (RA) 7160 or the Local Government Code (LGC).
(November 24, 2005 issue)
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