Vice Mayoralty aspirant and Councilor Elaine Dominguez Sembrano underscored the need for the city government to conduct continuous and sincere consultations with the concerned sectors on the proposed multi-billion market development project to be able to come out with a ‘win-win’ solution for the realization of the long-overdue improvement of the city’s show window.
The 3-term local legislator pointed out that consultations should not be done a few times but it should be a continuous process of concerned departments of the city government to be able to earn the trust and confidence of the affected sectors to openly articulate their real positions on how to push through with the desired development of the city public market.
Councilor Sembrano claimed that she also wants the various cooperatives in the market to consider her proposal to partner with a competent corporation that can be tapped to implement the market development project to ensure that their money will be also earning while they will be operating as cooperatives of vendors in the market.
She admitted that the combined assets of the cooperatives of vendors in the market is not sufficient to bankroll the proposed development of the city public market that is why the best thing they can do is to partner with a company that can be tapped by the local government to work on the project aside from ensuring that the market cooperatives will have their duly authorized to ventilate their issues and concerns on how the project will be undertaken and to ensure the security of the legitimate stallholders.
According to her, there is a need to pursue the long overdue market development project but it should be done in a modality that is openly accepted by the concerned sectors to ensure that there will be no undue interruptions during the course of the project implementation like what happened in the case of the market development project in 1996.
The councilor encouraged concerned sectors in the public market to be open-minded on the proposed market development project with their counter proposals for the involved parties to be able to craft the desired ‘win-win’ solution for the realization of the project that had been stalled for nearly 2 decades.
Sembrano stipulated that she already heard numerous issues and concerns raised against the proposed multi-billion market development project that is why she wants all involved parties to continue the consultations to prevent disgruntled parties from eventually stalling the implementation of the project by filing cases that might derail the realization of the project for another 2 decades once nothing will be achieved.
Earlier, the local government decided to pursue the implementation of the development of the public market through the Public Private Partnership for the People ordinance by inviting interested companies to submit their respective unsolicited proposals on how to undertake the project through the private-public partnership scheme.
The development of the city public market was supposed to be the local government’s first private-public partnership project but this was eventually overtaken by the imposition of the election ban for the upcoming May 9, 2022 synchronized national and local elections.
