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Friday, August 18, 2006
Roperos: Mandaue lot tug-of-war
By Godofredo M. Roperos
Politics Also
Concerning my piece last week on the brewing political cauldron in Mandaue City, I received pertinent documents about the issue from Mandaue and from the Philippine Reclamation Authority (PRA) that, it appears, has become an unlikely, as well as an unexpected third party to the heightening controversy.
Going over the documents, I say the situation will probably grow worse before it grows better.
The object of controversy is a piece of real estate that, based on documents that the Mandaue City information staff sent to me, was once a “reclaimed foreshore land in Looc, Mandaue City that is covered by a Memorandum of Agreement that will end in 2018.”
Actually, an area of 11,432 square meters is what the city has been trying to recover since 2004 when the city, in a letter to Norberto Quisumbing, Jr. president of Norkis Trading Co., Inc., informed him about his firm’s violation of the agreement.
In trying to play down the allusion we made in our piece in this space last week that there appears to be politics behind this move by Mandaue, I was furnished certain documents.
One of these is a photocopy of the recommendation of the city’s legal office to turn down a Norkis Provident Foundation’s request to build a recreation center on said property in 2001 because of violation of its contract of lease.
This would justify the sending last week to the Quisumbing patriarch of a “demand to vacate.”
But this is only in so far as Mandaue City’s assertion that it owns the property in question.
The problem is that a third party, PRA, has noted the opinion of acting minister of justice Catalino Macaraeg in 1979 that then president Ferdinand Marcos’ Presidential Decree No. 3A has superseded the charters of the city of Mandaue.
It is even said that Danao City, from whose charter that in Mandaue was based, has tried to register with the PRA.
In this wise, reclaimed areas in Mandaue, despite the provisions of its charter, is presumed to be owned by the National Government.
And the provision of PD 3A, to me, smacks of martial rule when it comes to reclamation areas.
Part of it provides that the reclamation of areas under water or inland, shall be limited to the National Government or any person authorized by it under a proper contract…
“All reclamation made in violation of this provision shall be forfeited to the state without need of judicial action.”
The last phrase should raise some kind of havoc to all those who have reclaimed certain underwater areas, whether they be local governments or individuals, and have not gotten any permit from the proper agency of the National Government, notwithstanding their charters.
Under this contention of the PRA, that with the presumption of delegated authority from the President those with reclaimed areas should register with it, the “quarrel” between the Norkis Trading and the City of Mandaue, may have presumably become moot and academic.
None of them could lay claim to the area, unless proven it isn’t reclaimed.
For Bisaya stories from Cebu. Click here. (August 18, 2006 issue)
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