What bothers Mayor Jerry Treñas?

By Herbert Vego

 

GUESS what’s constantly bothering Iloilo City Mayor Jerry P. Treñas?

Our guess is that while he is worried about the prolonged “invasion” of the coronavirus disease (COVID-19), there now looms  the bigger threat of a dying economy that is frustrating his election-campaign promise to “level up”.

The mayor has repeatedly said, “This should not go on. We have to survive even in the midst of the pandemic.”

To do that, he needs to quell the spread of the disease in order to motivate the people to return to the “old normal” while wearing face mask and eye shield, social-distancing and hand-washing.

It is a pity that, until now, very few shoppers and diners visit the malls and restaurants for fear of contamination.

The mayor personally knows of businessmen and workers who have gone bankrupt and jobless, respectively. Where to get the next meal has already become a problem to the latter.

For them, there is no more money left for emergency situations. Bawal na talagang magkasakit.

It was to ensure the constituents of his helping hand that Mayor Treñas had inked an agreement with the management of Gaisano City, which had agreed to donate a 375-square property for construction of a five-story Iloilo City Center (ICC) that would house the City Disaster Risk Reduction and Management Office (CDRRMO), Public Safety and Transportation Management Office (PSTMO), the Iloilo City Action and Response (ICARE) Center, as well as the police and fire stations.

As far as we in the media are concerned, the clarion call of the moment is to tone down reports on COVID-19 cases and erase the stigma of the disease as “incurable” simply because it’s not true. If it were true, then most of the 12,837 total cases recorded in our region in the past seven months would have died; so far, only 288 have passed away. If I remember right, only 40 of them were from Iloilo City.

The total number of COVID-19 deaths in the entire Philippines stood at 5,925 as of yesterday.

I am sure many more than that number have succumbed to other diseases. Take it from the Philippine Statistics Authority (PSA), an average of 1,587 Filipinos were already dying daily of different causes in the pre-COVID past.

The poorest of the poor in the slums know that they have better chances of dying of hunger than of COVID-19.

It used to be “isang kahig, isang tuka” for the least fortunate families; now it’s “walang kahig, walang tuka.” Among them are women who have lost their husbands.

The city mayor has assigned himself the task of reversing their fate. To begin with, in cooperation with the Bureau of Jail Management and Penology (BJMP), he gave the inmates a source of income by asking them to make parols or lanterns that the city would hang around the streets during the Christmas season.

Batò, Iloilo!

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MERALCO, everybody knows, is the experienced, sole power distributor in Metro Manila. If so, what has it to do with us Ilonggos?

The good news is that its subsidiary, the Meralco Industrial Engineering Services Corporation (MIESCOR), has partnered with MORE Electric and Power Corp. (MORE Power).

MIESCOR boasts of the highest contractor license category, AAA. Its specialty is in electrical works and in general engineering and building, civil and mechanical works.

MIESCOR engineers and technical personnel were in Iloilo City last week to install the new 10MVA mobile substation at the Megaworld area.

MORE Power is committed to eliminating illegal connections and other deeply-rooted problems of Iloilo City’s electric distribution system; and continuously upgrading and improving it.

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Senator Imee Marcos is working on the suspension of the practices of banks and financial technology companies imposing transaction fees until the latter half of next year,  when a vaccine for COVID-19 would have been available.

Marcos, who chairs the Senate committee on economic affairs, said, “We made a big push with the help of the Bangko Sentral ng Pilipinas to give a 60-day debt moratorium to the public, only to be offset by new charges.

“Those who were gainfully employed have been forced to find an alternative means of livelihood online. Let’s promote the growth of small businesses during this crisis,” Marcos told the media.

Among the fees that Marcos wants to be postponed longer are service charges of 15 pesos for money transfers, 20 pesos for over-the-counter transactions and for cash withdrawals via Mastercard, and financial-technical fees of 1% to 2% on cash-in and over-the-counter transactions of Php8,000 and above.

Owners of small online businesses that have barely started complain that the sudden introduction of fees makes it more difficult for them to cope with the economic crisis.

Some 75,000 online businesses that are registered in the country use  the services of almost 200 companies that deal in money lending, bill payments, digital wallets, and remittances.