GOOD TILL CHRISTMAS ONLY

The Dagupan City council has joined the Christmas shopping fever by offering its own “discount” program to perk up business activities at the near empty second-floor of the Malimgas Public Market and hopefully buoy up the finances of the now cash-strapped city government.

The plan is to offer a 50 per cent discount in stall rentals to new applicants at the second floor of the public market for the Christmas season for the period October – December but it was not clear if present stallholders will be granted the same covering the same period.

This was revealed by Vice Mayor and Sangguniang Panlungsod presiding officer Alvin Fernandez during a breakfast forum of the Pangasinan Tri-Media Association last Thursday.

Fernandez said the plan as submitted by the council’s committee on ways and means, has the   backing   of all councilors and Mayor Benjamin Lim.

He said they are confident that the discount will entice the traders who pulled out their stalls from the second floor of the market to return for the shopping season. Presently, stall occupancy in the area is down to less than 50 per cent.

Many of the original stall-owners have since left the new Malimgas market – designed to look like a commercial mall complete with air-conditioning and serviced by an escalator- when it failed to attract regular patronage leaving their operations unprofitable given the high lease rates imposed by the city government.

The new scheme is being bandied today after the series of activities adopted in the past to recoup losses failed.     

The vice mayor admitted that when the second floor of the public market failed to reach its revenue target, the city government began experiencing great difficulty in amortizing its P315 million loan with Land Bank of the Philippines since 2004.

Fernandez said the occupancy of the stalls at 50% discount will still translate to added revenues to the city, and that the experience will hopefully lead to an increase in the occupancy level next year.

“We will negotiate with the stallholders on the amount of rentals that would be charged for next year depending on the cash flow,” Fernandez clarified.

But revenues from the third and fourth floors of the edifice remain practically zero since negotiations for the transfer there of the Land Transportation Office, National Bureau of Investigation and National Statistics Office have failed.

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