By Ermin Garcia Jr.

 

THE year has ended and the public has not been informed about details of the overseas travel to the USA and Spain of the provincial board members and their favorite provincial officials.

Who paid for their travel? Pray tell, VG. Mark Lambino and Provincial Administrator Melecio Patague Jr.! In fact, that was the second group travel in less that 12 months. And the Guico administration also kept the Pangasinenses of their first USA and Japan travel expenses, in the dark.

Is this the corporate governance policy of Guv Mon-Mon Guico? For the officials not to feel accountable to the people, but just be accountable to the governor?

If their travel expenses were not taken from an allocated fund in the annual budget of the province, whose funds were made available to our provincial officials? Was it the San Miguel Corporation who was chosen to build the Pangasinan Link Expressway from the governor’s hometown, Binalonan, to Lingayen?

In Pangasinesses’ book, it’s a case of graft!

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FILTHY BEACHFRONT. Still at the Capitol beachfront, regular beach visitors are dismayed by the untidy and filthy beach they are seeing almost every week.   To them, it looks like the regular cleaning of the beach shore is not a priority of the corporate governance of the Guico administration.  But isn’t tourism one of its corporate priorities?

As one of the regular visitors at the beach noted, the crew from the PDRRMO can be seen using only sticks to pick up the filth and garbage on the beach. She said she even wonders where and how they dispose of the ‘picked’ garbage because the crew doesn’t carry plastic garbage bags with them.

Is the order from the corporate board simply to go through motion of cleaning up, never mind the results??  Walang kita kasi?

She recalled how the Espino administration even required Capitol employees to do their part every Friday, cleaning the beachfront to keep the environment clean! 

The Lingayen beachfront has always been the lead beach tourist destination in the province, no longer??

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DONE AND LOST. It’s done. Nothing passed and adopted in the last 55 days by the new majority, who soon will be back to its respectable status as the old minority, can be undone.

The 7 epaLiFes cannot also undo the wrong they did to the city when they walked out and boycotted the sessions after they realized there was nothing they could do without their barkada of 7 complete. Their decision to waive their role as the minority, as fiscalizers, can only be seen as a dereliction of their official duties. In fact, I wonder how they can extricate themselves from the legal quagmire if any of their constituents decide to file a complaint against all 4 boycotters.

Then, worse, I don’t know how the 7 epaLiFes can win back the trust and confidence of VP Sara Duterte after failing to assure her that Dagupan City could be one of her bailiwicks if she designated Dagupan as one of her OVP’s satellite offices in the country.  The disappointment of VP Sara was palpable when she chose to celebrate the OVP’s anniversary in Lingayen last November, not in Dagupan City. I’m almost sure that with Brian Lim at the helm of the 7 epaLiFes, who betrayed Dagupeños, she finally realized that she would not earn the support of Dagupeños that the epaLiFes promised her.

So, I even doubt if Brian Lim was invited to the official event as head of the Dagupan satellite office. Tsk tsk. But that’s done. She lost Dagupan because of the 7 epaLiFes’ obstructionist policy instead of promoting the activities of the OVP.

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NO SMOKING IN 2025? To stop smoking is one of the more common New Year’s resolutions of smokers “made to be broken every year.” It was the case with me, a cigarette smoker since high school through college and working on the Sunday Punch since the 70s and busy working on the country’s travel and tourism industry in the 80s. (Yup, I headed the Philippine Travel Agencies Association, and the Tourism Council of the Philippines. And finally headed the ASEAN Tourism Council).  Stressful life.

Among us smokers then, smoking was our way of de-stressing, not for porma. Although it also helped build on one’s courage to flirt with the girls, little did I know that most girls I met resented guys smoking in front of them. So, I got nowhere.

What made me finally stop smoking? Perhaps it was fate that I came across the colored photograph of a smoker’s lungs on Time Magazine. Boy, it was ugly, the kind that told me that the guy who had those lungs only had weeks to live.

It was the will to live longer and not die of lung cancer. But knowing that was not enough. I had to know in what state my lungs were. I couldn’t help but wonder the whole time how my lungs looked!  A doctor-friend helped me with my cause and requested an x-ray of my lungs! And voila! It was no better than that I saw in Time Magazine. That’s when it dawned on me that I was going to die of a painful lung cancer soon if I didn’t stop.

There and then I decided to stop. I pulled out my Marlboro pack and crushed it in my hands with still some 10 sticks in it.  Gratefully, my doctor-friend said it‘d take at least 6 months before I rid my lungs of deadly nicotine.

I couldn’t wait for 6 months to get the promised results. The next x-ray showed my lungs were 75% clear of nicotine. I had to continue battling the cravings to smoke for the past first 3 months. 

The thought I was winning the battle gave me more motivation to win completely.

I have not smoked since then, not even to light firecrackers! I was also spared by Covid-19. Thank God!

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I’m resuming my PUNCHLINE podcast with IFM manager Mark Espinosa this Monday, 6:30 a.m. and PUNCHING DUO with Gonz Duque on Saturday 10:30 a.m., with replay on Wednesday at Pangasinan News Media website of Pebbles Duque.

Let’s all make 2025 a much better year for our families!

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