Saturday, June 16, 2007 ‘Bogo City’ an 8-year-old dream By Jeanette P.Malinao Sun.Star Staff Reporter
TODAY, the people of Bogo will cap eight years of struggle to become a city by going to voting booths to register their stand on the issue.
Always overtaken by events, the move to become a city started on Jan. 6, 1999, when the municipal council of Bogo passed a resolution requesting Congress to make the first-class town into a city.
The Cebu Provincial Board then conducted a public hearing on the matter on May 31, 1999, and passed a resolution supporting the move.
However, politics both in the local and national scenes provided stumbling blocks to Bogo’s dream of becoming a city.
The fierce rivalry then between the family of Celestino “Junie” Martinez Jr., the fourth district’s political kingpin, and then senator John “Sonny” Osmeña proved to be a catastrophe to the bill that Rep. Clavel Martinez filed in June 1999.
(Now, however, Osmeña and the Martinezes are friends, banding together against Gov. Gwendolyn Garcia.)
Formidable odds
In December 2000, or a month after the Nov. 4 public hearing by the House committee on local governments, Osmeña blocked the bill for Bogo while at the same time pushing for the conversion bill for Talisay City filed by his ally, Rep. Eduardo Gullas.
Aside from Osmeña, the Bogo Business Association in 2001 also raised objections to the move. Local businessmen feared they would be swamped with competition from out of town if Bogo, the trading center of northern Cebu, becomes a city.
Despite the odds, members of the Martinez family were then optimistic a plebiscite would be held before the May 2001 local and national elections, but Clavel and the rest of the House of the Representatives were buried with work in the impeachment of then president Joseph Estrada.
Even if the Martinez family had managed to have the bill approved in both houses of Congress, Osmeña, an ally of Estrada, had then warned that Estrada could not be expected to sign it into law because Clavel was a member of the House panel of prosecutors working against the president.
Martinez’s reelection in 2004 gave her the opportunity to file the bill again on Sept. 23, 2004.
This time, the approval of the bill was hampered by the new income requirement for conversion of towns into cities: from P20 million to P100 million, excluding shares in the Internal Revenue Allotment (IRA).
Income exemption
Martinez, along with sponsors of new-city bills for at least 20 other towns, sought exemption from the new income requirement.
The House of Representatives granted them exemptions, citing the fact that the bills were filed before the new requirement was approved.
Last Feb. 1, 2007, the Senate local government committee finally approved the conversion of 12 municipalities into cities, including Cebu’s Bogo and Carcar.
The League of Cities lobbied against the approval of the bills because with the new cities, their share in the IRA will be reduced.
Given that advocacy by the league, President Arroyo did not affix her signature of approval on the bill but allowed it to lapse into law last March 15.
As residents of Bogo cast their vote on the town’s cityhood today, the “yes” votes would probably win as officials predict.
But Bogo’s fight to become a city will continue, this time against the complaint the League of Cities filed in court, questioning the legality of the exemption given to Bogo and 11 other towns from the new income requirement.
