Bringing the RESULTA vision from policy-making to execution

Twice before, since my election as Vice Mayor of the City of Cebu in 2022, have I stood before this august body and rendered my report of what we as the Sangguniang Panlungsod has done for the year that was and then set our policy-making direction for the year that is to be.

I feel wistful having to yield that task today to Acting Vice Mayor Dondon Hontiveros, my friend for many years, especially because the past two years have been among the most meaningful years of my professional life as a civil servant.

Together, as one Sanggunian, we passed meaningful ordinances and conveyed, through our resolutions, are collective thought and position on matters of tremendous importance.

Working together, we passed, among other important measures, the ordinance creating the Heritage District of Cebu and formulating the Heritage District Council; we worked to institutionalize the Sangguniang Panlungsod Day and the Order of Rajah Tupas, the highest award the Sanggunian can confer a Cebuano; the Cebu Heritage Awards, to promote the importance of preserving the heritage and the cultural  treasures of Cebu; and the Sugbuanong Bahandi” awards, to recognize Cebu’s masters and inspire upcoming ones, and declared every month of August as Cebu City Arts Month.

Similarly, though our stands may differ on certain things, we have always been bound by our common and all-encompassing goal, which is working for what we feel and know is for the best or our constituency in the City of Cebu.

This goal, I believed then as strongly as I believe now,  ties us together and makes us true equals – each of us primus inter pares – despite our differing party affiliations.

This equality was what drove my decision then, as it drives my conviction now, to facilitate that all members of council, regardless of affinity, should have all the tools — service vehicles, office equipment, and adequate staffing – needed to facilitate the completion of all our deliverables.

This has made the 16th Sangguniang Panlungsod a bastion of law-making that sustains not only the socio-economic and socio-political concerns of the city and its inhabitants, but also for the preservation of our history, culture, and identity, the arts, and of urban development that does not sacrifice sustainability of the environment.

The 16th Sangguniang Panlungsod has delivered what it has been mandated by law to bring forth: well-crafted legislation that uplifts the lives of our constituents.

But, as was my oath when I took office alongside all the members of the 16th Sangguniang Panlungsod in 2022, to “faithfully discharge to the best of my ability, the duties of my present position”, which include to “automatically exercise the powers and perform the duties and functions of the local chief executive” in cases where the local chief executive is temporarily incapacitated, I have to come to you today under a provisionally different capacity and purpose.

Nevertheless, I remain committed with you in seeing, through-and-through, our RESULTA vision, the vision that we rallied behind here in the Legislative, and the vision I hope you will support as I bring it to the Executive.

It is imperative that we remain: RESPONSIVE to the needs of our constituency; committed to advancing EDUCATION opportunities of the socio-economically disadvantaged; focused on enabling a truly socialized and equitable system for SETTLEMENTS or housing; dedicated to URBAN DEVELOPMENT that does not sacrifice the sustainability of our environment, the health of all living things, the protection of our culture, identity, and heritage, and the state of our agriculture and food security; resolute in facilitating LIVELIHOOD and opportunities for meaningful, viable, and dignified labor; steadfast in addressing the behemoth task of ensuring that people and goods are able to go to where they need to go in the fastest and most convenient way possible by exploring intermodal systems of mass TRANSPORTATION; and, unwavering in ADVANCING the participation and representation of civil society in governance by giving space for meaningful engagement, empowerment, dialogue, exchange of ideas and consensus-building, which can lead us towards jointly facilitating, designing, and implementing more effective responses to needs of our city.

I said this as vice mayor then and I say it as acting mayor now, RESULTA ang GARANTIYA.

Much has been reported of the actions we’ve undertaken in the almost two months I have been acting mayor.

Suffice it is to say that, for the remaining months, we shall continue to be responsive to the needs of our constituency in the manner that has served us well the last two months – with diplomacy.

Through diplomacy, we managed a meaningful dialogue with the MCWD; dialogue that is poised to bear the fruit of water connection to the mountain barangays, thereby responding to the needs of constituents in the uplands.  

Through diplomacy, we have brought the Cebu Ports Authority back into the negotiating table and closer to resolving the dispute involving three properties that, when managed, enables us to respond to the need for livelihood opportunities for hundreds of people, we well as revenue for the city.

Through diplomacy, we come meaningfully closer to finally resolving the 93-1 issue, which means responding to the needs of the many Cebu City residents who are occupying province-owned lots and who have been trying, since 1993, to lawfully acquire these.

Furthermore, through diplomacy, we may yet unlock an opportunity for the many others who are occupying lands not part of 93-1 but declared as socialized housing sites, and others who are occupying province owned lots not yet declared as for-socialized-housing-use.  

 But alongside being diplomatic in our ways, we shall also be resolute in our desire to be responsive to the needs of the rest of our constituency. The public shouldn’t be made to wait for public service and those of us in public service must, at all times, be willing to provide service beyond self.

In this vein, and manifested in the simplest of things like our now-shorter flag ceremonies so that people lining up at our frontline offices on Mondays get served a bit sooner, we will continue to emphasize efficiency in government service.

We will continue to streamline the city’s processes in the manner consistent with how we streamlined the services of our City Assessor’s Office.

We will continue to observe the sound fiscal management you saw us employ for the upcoming Palaro, despite our considerable financial reach.

We will make sure that we spend only what needs to be spent to gain the maximum quality of service for our constituents, even as we recognize that public service is a public trust and involves the critical responsibility of managing and utilizing taxpayer funds, requiring transparency, accountability, and efficiency, for the benefit of society.

We shall continue harnessing technology to facilitate improvement. I have directed the adoption of new technologies in our issuance of IDs for Persons with Disabilities, which also doubles as pilot testing for a wider rollout that now includes our senior citizens.

On responsiveness to the healthcare needs of our constituents, we will continue with the direction of bringing health-focused infrastructure to the communities, similar to how we operationalized the mothballed Apas Super Health Center, which we recently inaugurated after two years of non-use, and the Guba hospital which, in a few weeks, we will also be inaugurating.

This resoluteness of purpose we will also continue to apply to the biggest investment Cebu City has made as far as healthcare facilities go – the Cebu City Medical Center – that, for the last 10 years, has only been granularly operational.

On education, we shall continue our work towards finally establishing the Cebu City College and build it, ground up, to be an institution of higher learning for our constituents. The ordinance is up for third reading and I pray that my colleagues here will take the cudgels to ensure its passage.

On settlements, we shall pivot our efforts towards developing properties which Cebu City already owns and then leverage national government programs like President Bongbong Marcos’s 4PH initiative.

While we held a groundbreaking for the South Coastal Urban Development Project, many parcels of land included in the proposed site are privately owned. Mobilizing the time, effort, and resource towards its acquisition, vis-à-vis the fact that there are lands that we presently own, may prove itself a gargantuan waste of time.

On urban development, Cebu City will continue its thrust towards socio-economic growth but shall take great pains to ensure that  development does not sacrifice equally-important indicators such as sustainability and livability.

We need to restructure our strategy on the management of waterways and runoff and consider the plans and direction of neighboring, LGUs because flooding is a shared problem that requires shared solutions.

We can improve our drainage all we want. But if that improvement is not at par with our neighbors, we only migrate the problem elsewhere, or invite their problem here.

We have waged a war on flooding but flooding is a mere symptom of mismanagement of what is otherwise a crucial resource.

We will continue to capacitate and equip our frontline workers so that the solutions and initiatives the propose will consider the cause, not merely the effect.

We shall continue our efforts towards biodiversity protection, coastal resource management, climate resilience, and attaining food security, while working to uplift the lives of our farmers and our fisherfolks, as vigorously as we work to uplift the lives of our urban poor.

On transportation, we shall continue to explore other intermodal systems of mass transport and find the best fit for Cebu City. We are thankful for the presence of urban planning experts who are ready, willing, and able to assist us in this regard.

The BRT is a divisive issue, but the tension the topic causes is merely an indicator that (1) everyone is invested in resolving this major concern; (2) people have become aware that we cannot simply cut-and-paste a solution that worked in Curitiba, Brazil, to solve a Cebu City problem; and, (3) maintaining a status-quo ante on transportation modalities vis-à-vis a Cebu City that is growing year-on-year will not work. 

On livelihood, we shall strengthen our continuing and continuous effort towards the establishment of a Creative District, as this brings opportunities to those looking for jobs in the creative sector – filmmaking, animation, digital arts, and the like.

The creative district shall be a major economic driver for Cebu City, in the same way the IT park was when it was begun by my father, the former mayor Alvin B. Garcia.

But we shall do this while continuing to preserve our history, heritage, identity, and culture, by also operationalizing what we have so far established with the passage of our ordinance establishing Cebu City’s heritage district and heritage district council.  

And we ensure success by advancing inclusive governance and ensuring the participation of all sectors in consensus-building and decision-making.

We further ensure success by moving away from insular thinking that one person possesses the proverbial panacea of all woes. This is why I have, since my first day as acting mayor, tapped members of this august body as overseers of executive offices.

This room has experts in various fields – revenue generation, infrastructure, livelihood generation, the environment, technology, social welfare, agriculture, etc. And it would be such a waste if their expertise will not be leveraged.

And we ensure success, finally, by rallying behind the same vision – that of ensuring good, tangible results for our constituents. Because, Resulta ang atong Garantiya.