BAGUIO CITY – The city on Monday celebrated its 99th foundation year, reeling from a dispute over its own charter change plans.

Urban poor groups and activists gathered downtown during the Foundation Day parade, carrying placards condemning House Bill No. 2813, a proposed revision and modernization of the Baguio City Charter of 1909 which has been stalled in Congress since 2005.

Participants in the Baguio Land Conference sponsored by the Cordillera Studies Center of the University of the Philippines Baguio last week also issued a statement rejecting the measure after discussing it and concluding that it encouraged elitism and squatting.

Baguio Rep. Mauricio Domogan has secured a plenary schedule for the charter measure he sponsored, but he believes he is receiving flak for his efforts because of a flawed interpretation.

Agenda

The bill’s main agenda is to correct the city’s boundary from the 48.9-square-kilometer territory set in 1909 to its current 57.49 sq km.

But it also simplifies and corrects the way the city processes alienable lands, he said.

The Baguio charter was enacted by the American colonial officials who created Baguio on Sept. 1, 1909.

The original document has been misplaced, but it remains relevant for most policymakers because it institutionalizes the city’s town site reservation status.

Alienable lands administered by town site reservations are auctioned off by a Metro Manila-based task force to town site sales applicants (TSA) who can prove that they have used and developed their lots for years.

The American colonial government formed town site reservations in several parts of the country in 1907 but Baguio is the only active town site in the country today.

Domogan and his critics agree that the city’s crowded villages, its huge squatting problem and its dwindling land resource have all been attributed to the antiquated town site policy.

The charter reform bill removes the TSA body from the land disposition process and grants the city government complete control over land sales.

The bill also stipulates that legitimate town site applicants who live on their lots can process their titles without undergoing auction.

The charter amendments were initiated by the Free Legal Assistance Group (FLAG), which drafted a modern charter document that its former president, lawyer Pablito Sanidad, used as a campaign platform against Domogan during the 2004 elections.

Urban poor

But urban poor groups said Domogan’s bill stopped short of solving land titling problems because it would not dissolve the TSA process.

“The [titling] of town site sales applications (TSA) has been so expensive, controversial and anomalous such that there is conflicting land use, subdivisions, road-right-of-way [conflicts], [suits over the use of] watersheds and forest reserves and overlapping [land] surveys with different reference points,” said a position paper drafted during the conference.

During Monday’s rally, Villanueva Patting, secretary general of the urban poor group, Ipaden Organization, said: “It is the rich who get the titles in a TSA auction, and not the actual occupants.”

The urban poor group Ornus, in a paper presented to the conference, said the town site reservation was conceptualized by American governor general to the Philippines William Cameron Forbes as a fund-raising effort to finance Baguio’s development.