BANTAY GOBYERNO 168
By Ike Señeres
It
is a remarkably positive trend that new townships are being built all over the
country, albeit without a solid legal framework to back it up. For example,
there are now new townships such as Bonifacio Global City, Eastwood City, Eaton
City and Nuvali. The last one indicates that a geographic area need not be
called a city in order for it to qualify as a township. For lack of a better
term, we could perhaps say that any new geographic area that has the
characteristics of a planned development could actually be considered as a new
township. In reality however, these new townships are not, and need not be
politically independent from the jurisdictions of the towns and cities where
these are located.
For
so many years now, I have been arguing in my writings that all towns and cities
should be considered as municipalities, and the difference between them
are their charters and the legal basis for their creation. In theory, it could
be said that townships could be founded or built within towns and cities, with or
without separate charters to back these up. For all intents and purposes, these
townships could be considered as subdivisions or large subdivisions if you
please, and these could be governed within the existing legal frameworks that
are governed by subdivision laws or zoning laws. In a broader sense, these
townships are still covered by the Local Government Code (LGC).
As
it is supposed to be, all subdivisions are supposed to turn over the
responsibility for the delivery of public services to the towns and cities
where they are located, if and when these subdivisions are deemed to be already
“fully” developed, based on certain official standards. As it actually happens
however, the private developers who are in effect the legal owners of these
subdivisions are not inclined to turn over the delivery of public services, in
effect arguing that their properties are not “fully” developed. It seems that
the bottom line issue here is “control”, because if these subdivisions are
already turned over to the local governments, they would effectively lose
“control”.
For
all intents and purposes, “control” is actually just a political term, because
more often than not, the local governments are still obliged to deliver the
public services to the residents of these properties, such as fire, police,
ambulance, rescue, sanitation and garbage collection services. In other words,
the owners of these properties are able to get the best of both worlds. They
are able to retain “control”, but they are not obliged to deliver their own
public services. On the other hand, it seems that the local governments are the
ones that are at the losing end of this equation, because they have to spend
for the delivery of the public services, even if they do not have “control”.
Having
laid the predicate so to speak, I now would like to bring forward my argument
that local governments should empower the new townships within their
jurisdictions to operate as autonomous geographic areas, mandated to deliver
their own public services, without having to give up “control” of their own
local administration. On the positive side, what I really mean is that these
townships should be able to conduct their own governance, without being a
burden to the towns and cities where they are located. If these could happen,
the other residents of these towns and cities would benefit from the greater
availability of public services, because there would be more services that
would be available to lesser people.
As
it is now, many barangays near the towns and cities are already positioned to
either host or to become new townships. As a matter of fact, that is the trend
that I see in the future, for megacities to be formed out of the clusters of
townships within it and around it. In such a scenario, the burden of providing public
services for the broader megacities would not fall upon the center, because it
will be distributed all over the townships that would all be functionally
autonomous. To some extent, this approach is consistent with the principle of
subsidiarity, which is a principle of managing tasks at the lowest possible
units.
With
cities getting bigger than ever, the question of manageability and
sustainability would always come up. Common sense that development is easier
than sustainability, because it would seem easier to build than to sustain what
has been built. Looking forward, it would almost seem impossible to think about
a sustainable future without information communications technology (ICT) that
should be backed up by the internet of things (IOT). With that in mind, all
kinds of long term planning should now include ICT and IOT. To that effect, I
would be willing to help both local governments and townships in preparing
roadmaps towards that direction.
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