About that retraction by Michael Gleissner

There is an on-going Congressional Hearing on the sinking of the M/V Princess of the Stars supposedly to find out the cause of the tragedy. If you ask me, this is a mere duplication of what the Board of Marine Inquiry (BMI) is already doing. What is Congress trying to do here? Another “In-Aid-of-Elections” because the track record of Congress is zero laws to help or support our ailing shipping industry.

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I was in Mactan last Sunday afternoon and I was terribly disappointed to see the poor state of the road along Patalingjug Ave. all the way to the two Export Processing Centers along ACOLAND and CLIP because this road has been neglected and broken for years! If you’re from out of town, say you’re a businessman wanting to invest in Lapu-Lapu City, you’d probably think twice before making a decision to invest in that place because the city officials didn’t care to maintain this major avenue in their city.

Now if you’ve read all those self-congratulatory resolutions of the rubber stamp Lapu-Lapu City Council praising Mayor Arturo Radaza to the high heavens for bagging the metro category of the top cities in the Philippine Cities Competitiveness Ranking Program (PCCRP) done by the Asian Institute of Management (AIM) Policy Center then I’m sure you’d want to find out whether the AIM researchers made a terrible mistake or not.

I’d like to point out that the AIM Policy Center researchers merely collate information given by the Local Government Units (LGU). With the information on hand, then AIM does the scoring. That means they never even visited any of the cities when they gathered their information. Otherwise, they would have been horrified to learn about the bad roads of the City of Lapu-Lapu. Hence, AIM’s scoring is defective to say the least!

By just passing along that road, you just can’t imagine how the City of Lapu-Lapu would be considered one of the best cities to live in the Philippines! By comparison, I’ve passed through the major roads in Quezon City and Marikina and I have never encountered any broken road as they have in Lapu-Lapu City. So how could Lapu-Lapu City be at par with these two capital cities? Hey, we’re not talking about the garbage heap that’s still being scattered around or the squatter communities just across City Hall.

Remember the old adage, “The proof of the pudding is in the eating?” Just before the 2007 elections, a lot of people saw a sign that was strategically placed at the spanking new facility at the International Academy of Film and Television (IAFT) that declared, “This Project is cancelled!” That sign was the subject of rumors that something bad was afoot in Bigfoot. It was then that I learned from Mayor Tomas Osmeña that Michael Gleissner told him about the corruption in Lapu-Lapu City and that instead of expanding his studio facilities in Mactan he would move elsewhere.

That today there is a huge Bigfoot facility now under construction at the South Reclamation Properties (SRP) is testament to Mr. Gleissner’s indignation at the Lapu-Lapu City officials. So now all of the sudden Mr. Gleissner has retracted all that? Wait! Didn’t Pres. Gloria Macapagal Arroyo (GMA) even go out of her way to help Mr. Gleissner on this issue?

Call this a product of Mr. Radaza’s proactive PR campaign if you wish, but if Mr. Gleissner confirms that story, then he just made a liar out of Mayor Tomas Osmeña and those of us who commiserated with him when he was down and disappointed with officials of Lapu-Lapu City to the point of erecting that sign for all of us to see!

If you’re garbage stinks, no amount of perfume or coverup can sanitize the stench created by your garbage. The solution is simply to just clean up your garbage and the smell would disappear. The whole problem stems from the fact that Mr. Radaza is making so many claims about what he has done for Mactan, things that happened long before he became mayor. Please don’t get me wrong, Lapu-Lapu City is a swell place to live, but if you conduct business there, you better be prepared to accept the inevitable. Perhaps that’s what happened to Mr. Gleissner; he probably accepted the inevitable and issued that retraction.

That there were businessmen who were reportedly subjected to bribes is a reality that many businessmen in Lapu-Lapu City had to face under the Radaza Administration. This “corruption” is traceable to the very public fact that the City of Lapu-Lapu bought computers that are so overpriced, he’s in hot water with the Office of the Ombudsman, aside from the infamous lamppost scam that made him nationally famous. Now even the Commission on Audit (COA) officials is also in hot water on this very same case. The truism here is that, no amount of PR can undo what he had already done.