“We are all like the bright moon; we still have our darker side.” — Khalil Gibran
By law, on June 30, 2025, at 12:00 o’clock noon, there will be the passing of the torch and the changing of the guards in all of the local government units nationwide, including the province of Palawan and the highly urbanized city of Puerto Princesa.
In the recently concluded local elections in Palawan, there was no formal pre-proclamation protest filed before the office of the Commission on Elections from any political camps, indicating that the majority of the electorate had accepted the result of the polls.
All the election winners were proclaimed by the poll body right after the votes were canvassed and counted.
On July 1, in the Capitol, of course, there will be some house cleaning to be done in the office of the governor, as new governor-elect Amy Alvarez will now have her days in the Capitol.
The new appointments of political personnel in coterminous positions will have to be completed, as well as the hiring of hundreds of job order (JO) employees.
These coterminous people will ensure that the programs of Governor Alvarez are properly executed provincewide.
Then, Governor Amy will have to order the conduct of an inventory of property, plant, and equipment (PP&E), which the Commission on Audit has referred to as tangible, long-term assets that the Capitol uses to produce goods and services.
I hope the records of the office of the General Services Office (GSO) in the Capitol are still intact and ready for physical inventory, as well as those of the office of the Provincial Engineer.
These property assets include land and buildings; as to the plant, these are machinery, equipment, and tools used in the production process, particularly in agriculture; and in terms of equipment, these are vehicles, furniture and fixtures, office equipment, and other tangible assets used in administrative operations.
And because Alvarez was a former mayor of the municipality of San Vicente, she has enough knowledge of the functions of an executive officer as a mayor on a micro level. Now, she will have to function on a macro level as the governor of Palawan.
Most probably, by December, Governor Amy will already be abreast of the workings in the Capitol, will have familiarized herself with the personnel, and a new budget proposal for 2026 will be passed and completed in the Provincial Board and finally signed by the governor.
While in the city government of Puerto Princesa, City Mayor Lucilo Bayron admitted he was surprised by the result of the elections—that he almost lost by a hair-thin margin of 1,646 votes over Vice Mayor Maria Nancy Socrates.
Before and during the campaign period, Bayron was complacent, believing he had amply performed his duties as mayor and delivered the basic services in the city, and that he could not be easily toppled as city mayor.
But what he got was a big package of surprise because he was on shaky ground and gained negative votes in the big barangays in the poblacion.
Although Bayron was proclaimed winner in the recent elections, he seemed quite dissatisfied with the result this time, unlike in the previous elections.
While it is true that he had tangible projects in the city proper, these only gained criticisms because they had never been completed or finished on time.
Bayron attributed the ire of the most populated barangays in the poblacion to the severe flooding and poor flood control engineering works.
Bayron was right to say that the problem was technical and not political—that he had to meet with the city engineers to understand what had happened in the flooded areas.
I can still remember when the strong Tropical Storm Uring struck southern Palawan in 1991; there was massive destruction of properties and houses, severe damage to agricultural crops, and numerous dead animals.
In the aftermath of Storm Uring, some deaths were not counted because they were washed out to sea, while other dead bodies were found ashore along the coastline of Pulot shore in Barangay Pulot, now the town of Sofronio Española.
In Barangay Tina, Jose Rizal town, it was a quagmire situation as there was no supply of electricity or potable water. The number of deaths remained unreported, as it was a similar situation in Pulot. The bodies of the dead individuals were washed out to sea in Jose Rizal town due to flash floods, caused by abandoned logging operations where logs left in the forest rolled down with the floodwaters.
I knew there was a news blackout about what happened in Tina, Rizal, Palawan at that perilous time. Officials of the local government were gagged.
In some of the houses that had been flooded, they found coffins inside their homes when the water subsided, because the public cemeteries had been excavated by the floods. There was nothing left in their cemeteries but sad memories of the floods. The cemetery was wiped out.
I had made frequent visits to Pulot during the time I established friendly relationships with some local Muslims there in 1991, and befriended Noel “Leon” Marin, who assisted me and my father in planting cabbage.
Former councilor Steve Manzul, now municipal administrator of Sofronio Española, knew all about this story of flooding in Pulot.
In 1991, like Pulot, the situation in Puerto Princesa City was somewhat similar. City roads were corrugated and not yet concrete. There were no canals, drainage, or flood control systems. It was a simple, barrio-type, undeveloped and unfamous city.
Then there was a clamor to have concrete roads in the city. After the 1992 local elections, the city government rolled out many infrastructure projects, mainly city roads, but no drainage.
It was true that there was no drainage, because it was not demanded by city residents, and pouring rain was not yet frequent.
After 30 years, climate change has brought so much destruction to properties and anxiety to the residents that overpouring rain would happen again.
Now, it is 2025. There is a city engineering office in the city government that can conduct scientific studies and prepare drainage plans for the city—plans that any city mayor should adopt, no matter what.
Although I am not an engineer, I adhere to science and logic.
Four years ago, I learned from Chinese-Filipino businessman Manuel Pua about the city drainage plan that was kept in the city engineering office. Pua showed me a blueprint copy of the drainage plan. I saw it myself and even wrote a story about it.
Pua said the city engineering office did not follow the master drainage plan that the city government had paid for.
Bayron cited the irritation of the four major barangays in the city proper as a possible reason for his near loss in the election.
So Bayron talked to the city engineers, and he must be seriously talking to them to properly address the flooding and flood control system in the city.
As everybody knows, the old and new city public cemeteries and the Loyola Memorial Cemetery are all near the sea. We could someday no longer see our cemetery if one strong tropical storm ever hits Puerto Princesa City—just like what happened in Pulot.
Let us not wait for a time when coffins would be seen along the stretch of Rizal Avenue or inside houses brought there by floodwaters.
City mayors come and go as they are politicians, but the city engineers are permanent employees of the city government. They are career service professionals whose responsibilities are much heavier than the city mayor’s.
If a private landowner refuses to give way to the construction of drainage, the remedy would be to excavate in the center of the roads and embed large culverts.
I saw this in San Pablo City, Laguna, where the roads were narrow, and also along España Boulevard in the city of Manila, where there was no space except the center of the road to embed the culvert to mitigate flooding.
But if City Mayor Bayron has decided to retire in 2028, then he may not be able to resolve the perennial problem of this beautiful city’s drainage and flooding in the city proper.
