Punchline
Relocation a logical solution
By Ermin Garcia Jr.
The Dagupan City council, led by Vice Mayor Belen Fernandez, has the right response to the environmental crisis waiting to happen at the Tondaligan Beach. The relocation of the district jail out of the beach scene must be seriously considered, and urgently.
What was obviously thought as a non-threatening move to relocate the city jail from the city hall premises in 1999 to the beach area must be viewed today as an alarming situation.
While the pollution of the beach by the district jail may not have reached crisis proportions yet, its relocation must be sought this early, and indeed, not only for environment’s sake but for the inmates’ welfare as well. If the trend continues, the beach water will swallow the jail in no time.
VM Belen is correct to freeze any plan to expand the jail’s facilities at this time and in the near future.
Immediate relocation is the only logical response.
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The city hall may have overestimated the size of its tourism officer’s brain.
She was glib to declare that the Tondaligan beach is not threatened by the gallons of wastes disgorged daily by the district jail situated at the beach shore out to the Lingayen Gulf.
Will she and her staff perhaps offer to do a “drink-test” from the jail’s spout that freely spews out the “safe” water to the beach water if only to prove that she’s right? (Please say you will, Ms. Tourism Officer!)
Given how glib and gullible she appears to be, she probably thinks the presence of the district jail by the beach makes Tondaligan an ideal tourism destination.
And if she can’t smell what the residents in the area smell, it can only mean one of two things – she’s used to the smell or her brain is as big as her pretty nose.
Gosh, if she can’t even see what threatens the city’s main tourist attraction, then the city can kiss its tourism industry goodbye, a proposition, I’m certain, should give both City Administrator Alvin Fernandez and Councilor Netu Tamayo, tourism committee chair, a serious cause for concern.
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Curiously, the city environment and natural resources office has been mum on the issue while everyone was debating the issue. I’m inclined to think that the office is no different from the city’s tourism office.
We have a CENRO operating inside Tondaligan that probably thinks the protection of the Lingayen Gulf is not within its mandate and that it should instead busy itself looking after the forests and illegal logging in the city. Don’t ask me where the forests are!
Perhaps the CENRO should join the city’s tourism office for a “clean water drinking test” at the back of the district jail. Make it a contest! The officer-in-charge who survives after one week without treatment will be declared the winner, and to the winner will go a life supply of the “clean water” from the district jail’s spout.
The PUNCH will gladly supply the sanitized water containers!
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NOT ANGRY ENOUGH. PNP provincial director “Smiley” Barba finally gave the provincial board its due – courtesy – by appearing before it.
His report, however, about the presence of “guns-for-hire” in the province was both anti-climatic and disappointing. What he reported was already long known to the public. How else can he explain the series of unsolved assassinations in the province?
He would have done his long indifference to the honorable members of the board justice by reporting on the status of the solved cases and the unsolved murders of politicians and judges. (Thank goodness, no local journalist has been made a part of the statistics).
Even the intelligence report about P25,000 assassin’s fee is old news. It’s comical how he emoted before the board, being angered by the cheapening of lives given the low rate. Duh? Whether the fee is P5,000 or P1 million, the fact remains nobody feels safe anymore.
He doesn’t seem to realize that Pangasinenses are outraged by the ability of these assassins to kill their targets with such impunity and so much ease, and the inability of the police to neutralize them.
“Where’re the police?” That’s the foremost question not only in the victim’s families’ minds but in everyone’s minds. Indeed. What have they done to stop the professional assassins? And since they could not stop them, what have they done to bring them to justice?
Try as he might to convince the province that the PNP is doing its best, the results speak for themselves. Appallingly disappointing.
Methinks, Smiley Barba is still not angry enough. He is still all smiles.
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