Beware of the Trophy Trap

Iloilo City Mayor Raisa Treñas-Chu opened 2026 with a bold target: propel the city into the Top 3 Highly Urbanized Cities (HUCs) by 2029. It is a vision inherited from her father, a continuation of the “RISE” blueprint that has defined the city’s recent history.

But a deeper look at the 2024 Cities and Municipalities Competitiveness Index (CMCI) suggests we are chasing the wrong prize.

We are currently ranked 5th, which sounds impressive until you look at the raw numbers. The playing field is weak. The top-ranked city in the country, Quezon City, only managed a score of 60.69 out of 100. The national median for HUCs is a failing grade of 39.8.

We are falling into the “best among the worst” trap. Celebrating a Top 5 finish with a score of 52.2 is like celebrating a passing grade in a class where everyone else is failing. It fosters complacency. If the administration wants true progress, it must stop looking at the neighbors and start looking at the scoreboard. The goal shouldn’t be “Top 3” – a relative metric that depends on others performing poorly – but a raw score of 70, an absolute metric of excellence.

The data reveals a “governance-economy mismatch” that threatens to cap our growth. Iloilo City is essentially a Ferrari engine inside a tricycle chassis. We rank 2nd nationwide in Government Efficiency with a score of 14.3. Our City Hall is streamlined, compliant, and responsive.

But we plummet to Rank 9 in Infrastructure (score 7.1) and Rank 7 in Economic Dynamism (score 6.4). We have created a city of world-class regulators with too little to regulate. We have streamlined permits, but we lack the physical hardware – roads, ports, and digital bandwidth – to move the goods those permits authorize.

This brings us to the “Efficiency Paradox.” We are winning in soft skills but losing in hard assets. Our “Road Network” indicator is a dismal 0.0731, ranking us 17th. Our “Local Economy Size” score is 0.0256, placing us 16th.

Efficiency cannot compensate for a lack of volume. You can have the most efficient traffic enforcers in the world, but if the road network is nonexistent, traffic still doesn’t move.

This creates a specific, difficult burden for Mayor Treñas-Chu. In her flag ceremony address, she called for “compassion, purpose, and integrity.” These are noble virtues, and they played well during the “beautification” and “livability” phase of the previous administration.

However, compassion cannot fix a 0.0731 road network score. Integrity does not increase bandwidth. To honor her father’s legacy, the mayor must be willing to pivot from the popular work of social services to the disruptive, dusty, and expensive work of heavy infrastructure.

The “RISE” roadmap must now prioritize the “E” (Economy) and “I” (Infrastructure) over the softer metrics. If we continue to polish our government efficiency while ignoring our single-digit economic scores, we will remain a well-managed city that is difficult to do business in.

The litmus test for 2029 is not whether we beat another city for the 3rd spot. It is whether we can finally score double digits in Economic Dynamism. We need to stop polishing the trophy and start fixing the engine.