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Wednesday, March 08, 2006
Mercado: Excess dollars at Clark
By Ram Mercado
First Person
THE next city mayor of Angeles should take up local tourism development as his priority. This was the consensus of most businessmen and small entrepreneurs in the community.
I have learned from the traders and most professionals that Angeles City is not getting its rightful share of tourist dollars from increasing Southeast Asian tourists visiting Clark Field.
The dollar earners are the entertainment establishments in the Fields Avenue vicinity, and these get their revenues largely from the Caucasian spender patronizing their compatriots' hotels and fun houses.
Local golfers who are amazed at the mounting arrivals from Asian capitals visiting Clark Field. The golfers learns that the visitors were briefed of the conditions prevailing in Angeles City, the lack of interesting highlights, and the general environmental sleaze everywhere.
This has prevented thousands of Korean, Taiwanese, Chinese, Singaporeans, Malaysians, Thais and Indonesians from going out of their confines at Clark. "These travelers, most of them awash with cash, could not spend all their excess money inside Clark. This could go to the Angeles City economy if the conditions here were conducive and attractive to walking tours," builder-sportsman Ricky Limjoco observed.
He said the visitors, when not playing golf, which is their principal activity in their five-day stay, also wanted to enjoy the sights and sound outside their hotel or villas.
Some of the repeat tourists vowed not to go back downtown Angeles where they underwent unpleasant and high-risk experiences. Include mugging, snatching, overpricing and fraud. In turn, the victims of local abuse inform their travel companions, until by word of mouth their ugly experience spread around. Clark Development Corporation VP Chichos Luciano has done a study on the potential dollar revenues Angeles City and environs could earn from Clark visitors. Luciano arrived at a staggering sum. This is the loss to Angeles economy.
To develop local tourism, Limjoco said, "requires massive collaboration of all organized sectors. The organizations must work to demand strong and effective governance of public institutions, with the city government as the prime mover." During a roundtable talk, business and community leaders agreed that the succeeding Angeles City chief executive must have the leadership to harness human resources, government action, and introduce innovation to promote the tourism industry.
Former Los Angeles Consul Rey Pineda, now a city restaurateur, could do it in a modest scale by organizing the Clark-Angeles Travel Association. He has transformed the "Strip" (Fields Avenue area) into an organization of highly disciplined, responsible, and law-abiding entertainment establishments. Given the commitment of a truly tourism oriented mayor, the businessman said, the tourists who arrive regularly by the hundreds at Clark should be spending part of their holiday budget in Angeles City.
Limjoco said the main eyesore of visitors is the general squalor in the environs. Koreans visitors told Ricky of the littered roads, uncollected trash at street corners, unpaved pedestrian walks, proliferation of beggars and streets children everywhere. With such dirty surroundings, no tourists anywhere would venture to exploit the area, he said.
Mayor Tarzan Lazatin has his tourism development program, organizing various groups to create order in the tourist district. Rey Pineda's organization, however, is confined only to the Fields Avenue where his members are located. The traders wanted the next mayor who can confront the perennial problem of protectionand well being of tourists, enforcement of sound ethical standards by local establishments, and sustained standard environmental conditions.
Limjoco who just returned from a Singapore tour noted that global tourism activities have accelerated this summer, and the fresh surge of travel is visible at Clark. "Angeles City must benefit from the spillover of tourists' expenditure, limited to sports activities (golf) for lack of any alternative venue or leisure in the outside community.
"Hundreds of tourists also get bored golfing all the time, or eating at the same place at Clark. They have plenty of money, they want to go out spend, and wide their vision of local life, Ricky said.
(March 8, 2006 issue)
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