Valenzuela tightens security at city hall

Security arrangements at the Valenzuela City Hall may soon see some significant changes after city administrator Anicia Marquez was held hostage in her office by a drunk sanitary inspector Monday.

Amid insinuations of a serious lapse in security at the City Hall, Mayor Sherwin Gatchalian said yesterday a review of security procedures at the city hall complex is forthcoming.

However, he said “we have to strike a balance” between increasing restrictions and allowing constituents to freely go into the city hall building because he does not “want them unnecessarily inconvenienced” and compromise public service in the process.

“All government facilities should, in fact, make a review of their own to prevent incidents like this one,” Gatchalian said.

A drunken Manuelito “Gene” Razon, a sanitary inspector at the City Health Office, barged into Marquez’s office on the third floor of the Executive Building at the new city hall complex in Malinta along MacArthur Highway.

Marquez said Razon wanted to air unspecified grievances directed mostly against his superior, sanitation chief Joe Tantay.

Razon was later subdued when he went out of Marquez’s office to find a restroom. Marquez told him the nearest was in the mayor’s office.

Razon is facing charges of illegal detention, grave threats and alarm and scandal.    – Jerry Botial