MANILA MAYOR ALFREDO LIM COMMITS POLITICAL SUICIDE

Suicidal

Manila mayor Alfredo Lim and his sidekick Isko Moreno are dragging their city to the pits.
In a cheap stunt, Lim played Pontius Pilate and bowed to the will of his own mob. He asked the crowd if he should sign a new ordinance that invites hazardous and highly polluting industries into the city, his own mob approved. At their well-rehearsed command, Lim signed an absurd ordinance that reverses all the previous efforts to regenerate the City of Manila and condemn the capital to becoming one large Smokey Mountain.
He might as well have declared his city to be the toilet bowl of the metropolis and fully opened its doors to the suicidal but profitable business of importing toxic wastes.
Everywhere else, old and gracious cities are cleaning up their urban cores, making them more habitable and raising property values in the process. They are exporting industries farther away from population centers — for health as well as for economic reasons.
When cities improve on the quality of life of their urban cores, they attract more productive citizens, sunrise industries, better commerce and exponentially higher property values. The cities earn more when they become more habitable. When they earn more, they make their cities even more habitable. It is a virtuous cycle.
Lim and his cabal, on the other hand, by sheer shortsightedness, are dragging their city into the quagmire. By making Manila a more hazardous place to live in, they will attract only scum, depress economic activity and property prices, force the city government to spend more on health care for the miserable.
If they were only a bit more sophisticated, Lim and his cabal might have learned from the experience of Rockwell or Eastwood City. Had both remained sites for dirty industries, these places would have economically stagnated.
Right smack in the City of Manila, they might have learned something from the decision to convert the San Lazaro racetrack into a major property development. That brought commerce and higher-niche taxpayers into an area that would have otherwise simply degenerated.
But Lim and his cabal do not seem to have a clear strategy for managing the city’s future.
When he took over City Hall in June 2007, Manila had a positive cash position of P2.6 billion. By December that same year, the city government had a deficit of P1.4 billion. Lim and his cabal do not seem to have the forward-looking financial skills to manage a modern city. Because of that, they are now dragging the city to a more primitive state, something akin to the city that outraged Charles Dickens two centuries ago: a city of filth and crime and despair.
In order to save whatever income the city gets from perilously hosting the fuel dumps, Lim’s cabal passed a resolution allowing heavily polluting and hazardous industries into the city. They seem to think that by making the city even less habitable, they will be saving jobs and preserving revenues.
No proposition in urban planning supports this strange thought. Property prices will be depressed. Commerce will be shooed away. Taxpayers will relocate. In the long run, a dying city will not possibly earn more.
In a word, there is no surer way of killing the City of Manila than to enforce this new ordinance. It is an ordinance that will favor three oil companies and doom the city’s future.
The other reasons advanced to sustain this ordinance are just as flawed.
The relocation of the Pandacan refineries will not cause unemployment. The highly skilled workers of oil depot would likely follow the relocation of the facility to Harbor City, which is just a short but safer distance away from the existing site.
At Harbor City, the proposed relocation site, the depot will be close to the sea. The tanks could be submerged to lessen the damage caused by any mishap. More modern handling equipment could be acquired to lessen environmental damage. The former mayor of Manila promised the oil companies that they could reclaim as much land as they want from the bay, the farther out the better.
International agencies estimate that a conflagration at the oil depot could cause a Tier 3 calamity. The stockpile could burn for weeks and even months, enveloping the whole metropolis in a toxic cloud.
Mayor Lim says that the depot is safe because it is part of a no-fly zone. That is not very reassuring. Manhattan Island was a no-fly zone. The Pentagon is in a no-fly zone. Both were attacked by terrorists in 2001.
Mayor Lim says that in its century of existence, no disaster has happened at the depot. That is faulty argument. In basic logic, we are taught that the fact that the sun has risen the past million mornings is not acceptable proof that the sun will rise tomorrow. The Pentagon, we will remember, was never attacked before September 11, 2001.
The encompassing ordinance allowing every variety of hazardous industry into the city to conceal the fact that the city government is acting to favor the three oil giants imposes great opportunity costs for Manila. It denies the city the opportunity to regenerate.
This ordinance harms not only Manilans. By condemning the inner city into a cesspool, this ordinance harms the entire metropolis. It will dirty the Pasig River beyond relief. It will thicken the toxic haze that already envelopes the capital region.
There are other legal and constitutional issues here. But we leave those for the courts to consider.