‘Overacting’ papal reception to worsen port congestion

Overheard on landline, the Islamist terrorist lectured his Parisian hostages why they must die: for paying taxes that enabled their officials to send peacekeepers to Syria.

Here, we pay taxes for political dynasts to steal, leaving us defenseless against street assassins, robbers, drug-crazed bus and truck drivers, and even stay-out heinous convicts protected by lawmen; rice, garlic, and onion supply-price riggers; multibillion-peso contractors for train non-maintenance; presidential and congressional pork barrel concocters; electricity mis-managers; illegal, dirty Chinese miners; and election procurement percentage commissioners. Together these constitute state terrorism, against which no one can complain.

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Everyday as protest mounts, Malacañang spokesmen blabber that commuter train fare hikes are “overdue” for operations and maintenance. Yet Transport Sec. and ruling Liberal Party acting president Joseph Abaya can’t defend such line, so purposely absented himself from last Thursday’s Congress hearing. Still, his subalterns inadvertently belied the spokesmen, as they admitted three things under grilling:

(1) The Dept. of Transport and Communications has no authority to fix fares. Under its Congress-enacted charter, only the Light Rail Transit Authority board of directors may do so, for LRT-1 and LRT-2. As for the Metro Rail Transit-3, the build-lease-operate contract prevails. Only by mutual consent of private builder-owner MRT Corp. and operator DOTC may fares be raised or slashed. There is no such deal today between the two. The only item on the table is MRTC’s offer to rehabilitate MRT-3 tracks and all 73 trains for $97.2 million (P4.37 billion), so long as fares are raised to the same bus rates on EDSA. The DOTC has not had the courtesy to reply to the proposal all these months. Which leads to the DOTC bureaucrats’ second admission.

(2) LRT-1 and -2, and MRT-3 are earning more than enough from ticket sales to cover operations and maintenance. On top of that, DOTC asked and got from Congress P977.6 million in the 2014 supplemental budget, and the same amount in the 2015 regular budget, for LRT-1 and -2 O&M. It also wangled separate P957 million in the 2014 supplemental and P2.57 billion in the 2015 budgets for MRT-3 O&M. So there’s nothing overdue except the LP administration’s reason for lying about the fare spikes. In fact, Sen. Nancy Binay cites from official records, Malacañang even diverted to the presidential pork, Disbursement Acceleration Program, P4.5 billion previously allotted for MRT-3 upgrade. This leads to the third confession.

(3) The present 50-80 percent fare increase won’t be the last. There would be biennial 10-percent hikes in the next 32 years under a DOTC commitment in the LRT-1 extension to Cavite. Meaning, proceeds of the fare hikes would go to the LP-aligned shoddy maintenance contractors.

For opposition congressmen, the admissions are enough grounds to scuttle the DOTC’s unjust exactions from the million or so daily riders.

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The Philippine Ports Authority foresees the five-day national holiday during Pope Francis’ visit to worsen congestion at the Port of Manila. Blockage would further delay the entry of goods and raw materials, and so push up commodity prices.

Taking up the cudgels for consumers, ex-trade secretary Ernesto Ordoñez cautions papal visit planners against overdoing things. He also requests the Customs bureau and private importers to work harder, after the long Christmas-New Year break.

Here’s the situation, from the standpoint of Ordoñez’s Port Congestion: Multi-Sectoral Group:

Manila city hall’s extension early last year of weekday truck ban hours triggered it all. Instead of the usual 4,500 trucks a day hauling cargo containers out of the port, only 3,000 could beat the clock. So piled up each day 1,500 newly unloaded containers from 23 to 28 ships. No-truck-ban weekends were not enough to ease the jam. Strict new Customs anti-smuggling rules also slowed down cargo departures. All sorts of racketeers restricted truck entry-exit and movement within the port unless bribed to step aside. Many cheapskate importers also used the port, an expensive piece of real estate anywhere in the world, as container yard. At its worst in July-Aug. the port clogged with 60,000 unmoved containers. By then all businesses – from fast-food chains to specialty “ensaymada,” power generators to underarm deodorants, steel bars to USB flash drives – were suffering. Eight major shipping lines decided to skip Manila, and drop off Philippine-bound containers at Kaohsiung and elsewhere.

Secretary to the Cabinet Rene Almendras untangled the mess somewhat by getting Manila to revert to the old shorter truck ban hours. The fine was raised from P300 to P10,000 a day for each container left un-towed, starting 15 days from Customs clearance. Customs sternness had to remain, after three years of crooked looseness. The racketeers stayed too, though reduced to playing cat-and-mouse games with lawmen. Congestion eased by one-fifth. Still the economy suffered one of its worst yearend slumps since Gringo Honasan’s 1989 coup attempt.

The 12-day Christmas-New Year break resumed the jam. While the PPA worked overtime to accommodate the 23-28 daily ship arrivals, the Customs bureau and port unions took off except Dec. 29 and Jan. 2. Importers too stopped hauling. One shipper who wanted to truck out 13 containers couldn’t do so for lack of clearance and loaders; he had to pay P130,000 a day for nine days, or P1,170,000.

Comes now the security closure of roads leading to the Manila port the whole five days of Pope Francis’ visit. This is although he will arrive at 5:45 p.m. of Jan. 15 well after work hours, be in faraway Tacloban City the whole of Jan. 17, and depart by 9 a.m. of Jan. 19. Ordoñez, a devout Catholic, has good reason to lament the “overacting.”

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