Monday, December 03, 2007 City milks 'child-friendly' tag for SRP brand
IF motorists start seeing toddlers crawling all over the welcome hill of the South Road Properties (SRP), it’s just the city mayor and their eyes playing tricks on them.
And it’s for good reasons, Cebu City Mayor Tomas Osmeña said.
After putting up the steel-framed sign, the mayor announced he will also put life-sized images of children playing and running around the hill as finishing touches to the SRP welcome sign.
The three-story-high sign made of welded aluminum pipes is almost finished, as well as the landscaping of the hill. It spells out the words “South Road Properties” and includes the SRP emblem.
Osmeña earlier explained that the sign cost a lot because it is designed to withstand storms up to signal number five.
The sign alone cost the City some P5.65 million, while the landscaping cost an additional P2.7 million.
Branding
But the additional finishing touches will not cost much, the mayor said, since there will only be a few images of children, “just enough to be noticed.”
“Your mayor may be a frustrated architect but this is not just foolishness, it’s branding. It says that Cebu City is for the kids and that’s really what SRP is all about. It is dedicated to the children of the city, those who have yet to be born,” Osmeña told reporters.
He added that the images of the children will give people the impression that the city is child-friendly and that the SRP will help realize the City Government’s projects and vision for the children through the income the SRP will generate.
The City has so far earned only P25 million from the 290-hectare facility that required a 12.292-billion yen loan (P5.958 billion as of August 2006) in 1997 to fund the project, but Osmeña is optimistic the City will make its first major sale before the year ends.
Last May, Bigfoot Global Solutions gave the City its 25-year lease payment for the two-hectare lot at the SRP amounting to P25 million.
Once the City earns from its first sale, Osmeña said that City Hall will spend P20 million for the construction of a tower beside the sign.
The tower will be multi-purpose, he said, and will have a coffee shop and double as a water tank that can hold up to 10 million liters of water from deep wells within the SRP. (LCR)
