MC Adore was for new city hall
WHAT HAPPENED?
THE controversial sale of MC Adore Hotel during the term of Mayor Benjamin S. Lim was resurrected during the recent public hearing of a draft ordinance seeking the transfer of the city hall to another site.
Barangay Caranglaan Chairman Teresa Coquia said there would have been no contentious issue about the transfer of city hall today if the Lim administration did not sell the hotel which Lim claimed earlier would be the site of a new city hall to justify the purchase of the hotel from the government’s Assets Privatization Office.
Nevertheless, Coquia and the rest of the barangay captains who spoke during the public hearing endorsed the transfer of the city hall, a structure built sometime in 1925, saying Dagupan deserves to have a new city hall.
Former City Planning Coordinator Romeo Rosario, now executive assistant of Mayor Belen Fernandez, said the purchase of the hotel was one of the first official act of Lim.
Records showed that the city government had been paying APO a monthly installment until 2007.
When Lim became mayor anew in 2010, he did not purse his pledge to transfer the city hall to MC adore, and as events later showed, he instead began brokering the ale of the MC Adore to the AMB ALC Holdings & Management Corporation, now the owner of the hotel.
On April 20, 2012, a resolution was passed during a special session of the Sangguniang Panlungsod (SP) authorizing then Mayor Lim to negotiate for the sale of MC Adore and a property bought by the city in Calasiao. (Note: Councilor Brian Lim led 8 others in voting for it).
In February 2013, the city council that still included then Councilor Lim, confirmed the sale of the MC Adore to AMC Holdings Inc. for P119 million, a price considered to be far below the market rate in 2012-2013.
Meanwhile, Rosario recalled that as early as 1960 to 1970, the city government had began acting on plans to transfer the city hall to a donated lot in Barangay Tapuac.
But it was not continued by the succeeding city administration of then Mayor Cipriano Manaois. (Leonardo Micua)
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