MANILA, Philippines - R-II Builders is proud to be the builder of Calapan City’s current pride and joy- its new public market that has gained, rather than suffered, from the costly but necessary P199 million makeover it got that turned it from an ordinary provincial city “palengke” to the mall-type shopping mecca it is now.
“Like the people of Calapan City, I’m proud of the new Public Market that we built for this fast-progressing capital city,” Reghis Romero III of R-II Builders said.
“We’re happy that just a few months after opening it to the public, Calapan City Mayor Paulino Salvador Leachon is now already considering expansion,” Romero noted.
The expansion, it was learned, seeks to build an annex to the current mall-type public market built by R-II Builders, for an outdoor area for about 70 stalls selling possibly ready-to-wear clothing items.
Romero said that the Calapan City experiment of building a modern and classier edifice for a public market proved to be a success, as has been envisioned by Leachon.
“There’s an aversion to building classy mall-type buildings to serve as a ‘public market’ among our local government executives because they subscribe to the concern of vendors that it will drive away the masa shoppers,” Romero said.
“Well, with the success of the new Calapan City public market that we built, we proved that this fear is really unfounded. We proved that, far from scaring away the masa, we showed that you can attract more of them to shop in the palengke or public market if its cleaner and classier,” Romero said.
In a statement issued by no less than Leachon himself, the new market was touted as “one of the best in the country.”
It was said that President Aquino, when he opened the market, said he was inspired because the new market rose from the ashes of an old one that was gutted by fire.