PERHAPS Lapu-Lapu City Mayor Paz Radaza and her advisers are thinking that the city would’ve a lot to gain by getting a P15-million Lapu-Lapu statue for free (including freight from Manila to Mactan).
On Lapu-Lapu mayor’s request, the statue would be removed from Rizal Park and transported to Mactan.
Perhaps the local decision-makers didn’t know that Cebu and Lapu-Lapu would lose the exposure that the hero and the province get by the statue’s presence at the Luneta.
Maybe they didn’t know the Manila bureaucrats from the start didn’t want Lapu-Lapu to be there (“Imperial Manila” and the “probinsyanos”). That’s why when Radaza made the request for the transfer, they must have been quietly yelling “Yippee!”
We are being duped, a Cebuano based in Manila told a Bzzzzz source. For almost a decade now, Rizal shares his park with Lapu-Lapu “and you want to take him out and put him in an obscure Mactan barangay”? How many tourists go to Mactan compared to those who visit the Luneta?
As Manilans love to say, “Hinayhinay lang, Day!”
JVR’s relatives; Cebu City’s debt
SO WHICH IS IT?
... TALISAY CITY MAYOR JOHNNY “JVR” DE LOS REYES has two relatives in the government, as he alleges in his Statement of Assets & Liabilities & Net Worth (SALN), or three relatives as a son alleges, or 11 relatives as other sources (a.k.a. critics) insist.
In published interviews, including an earlier Qs7 feature, JVR categorically gave a number bigger than what he stated in his SALN.
But then he must have referred to floor sweepers at the public market which must be, to the mayor, not employment.
There are ways to get out of this fix, a City Hall watcher says, but if the mayor “keeps digging holes big enough for him to fall into, he could fall or be pushed into one and covered with dirt he himself had dug out.”
... WOULD CEBU CITY BE PAYING LESS if it would borrow from banks, pay off the balance of its P5.3 billion debt to Jica, and shift the yearly payments to the banks?
Which scheme would work better for the city, assuming the city has a choice of creditors under its contract with Jica?
Mayor Mike Rama said the debt was P3 billion in 2001 and in 2014, the balance is still P3 billion. Somebody should give him and explain the correct figures. The City Council, of course, would’ve a lot to say if changing creditors would be better for the city.
Not true, a City Hall wag says, that a new mayor wouldn’t be confused by the figures.
“Critics need to be reminded that Mayor Mike has an excellent CPA-lawyer adviser.”
Someone in the City Council may not agree to that star billing of the adviser.
[bzzzzz@sunstar.com.ph or paseares@gmail.com]