Here and There
Let’s get rid of the ‘old’ City Hall
By Gerry Garcia
LACK of parking space continues to hound the city even after it had gone past its 60th year as chartered urban community and half of the proposed circumferential road designed to ease internal traffic has already been completed.
Even the expected opening of the new multi-B Dawel-Pantal-Lucao Road with its P906-M bridge within this month April is faced by the same problem related to parking space. It probably would lessen congestion on the city’s roads.
The pedestrian overpasses over AB Fernandez Ave. are incontrovertible indications pointing to a worsening of the parking space problem, especially in the downtown area wherein stands the City Hall — the government center.
The city hall was the same presidencia dating back to the American occupation days. Although it has been reconstructed to suit its being the center of administration, it has failed to satisfy a basic requirement demanded by the volume of transactions involving the participation of car-riding customers’ — space for parking cars.
City Hall, practically sitting in the middle of the market, occupies a narrow area and the space intended for car parking is even narrower.
In the coastal barangay Bonuan facing the historic Lingayen Gulf, we find the Tondaligan National Park targeted for tourism-oriented development, already accommodating a limited group of government and private agencies, like the Justice Department, Central Bank, Integrated Bar of the Philippines (Pang. Chapter), etc.
Ample parking space in the area is available, considering the sprawling ex pense of the park if Dagupan’s city hall were built on Tondaligan ground facing the Bonuan Beach, it would be like the provincial capitol facing the Lingayen Beach. The 2-lane Maramba Boulevard extending capitol-ward from the busy highway could be replicated here in Dagupan by constructing a 2-lane stretch of road from the San Fabian-Dagupan highway to the proposed new city hall… similar to the Maramba Boulevard leading to the provincial capitol.
A city plaza, to be part of the expansive Tondaligan territory can also be proposed to be established here and the prospects of drawing visitors from neighboring communities would be bright given the existence already of the heavily traveled San Fabian-Dagupan Highway which connects with the new about-to-be-finished Dawel-Pantal-Lucao diversion road.
The moment these are achieved, we can stop fidgeting over the looming possibility of Urdaneta City leaving us like a wet blanket after she had moved her city hall for the hurly-burly of the market place to a more likely area in the suburbs.
(Readers may reach columnist at sundaypunch2@yahoo.com. For past columns, click http://sundaypunch.prepys.com/archives/category/opinion/here-and-there/ For reactions to this column, click “Send MESSAGES, OPINIONS, COMMENTS” on default page.)
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