Local pundits are still talking about last week’s meeting between Cebu City south district Rep. Tomas Osmeña and Transportation Secretary and Liberal Party national president Mar Roxas. The dinner meeting at an uptown restaurant was to thresh out local issues in light of Tommy’s gripes about the administration party’s “lack of support for Cebu.”
The meeting ended on a sour note because instead of attending to local concerns, notably the flyover projects being pushed by Cebu City north district Rep. Cutie del Mar, Roxas reportedly gave Tommy an ultimatum to join the Liberal Party. Tommy resented the idea of being in the company of his political rival Mayor Michael “Mike” Rama, a recent addition to the Liberal Party and that reportedly prompted him to shout at the party bigwig.
Tommy has never joined any national party ever since he formed the local Bando Osmeña-Pundok Kauswagan (BO-PK) more than two decades ago. The party that bears his name has been in control of Cebu City Hall since 1987. BO-PK survived four presidents and up until last year, when Mike cut off his ties with Tommy, nobody was in the horizon to challenge his vise-like grip of the city. Amid Tommy’s endless carping about and needling of the Rama administration, the mayor was forced to leave the Osmeña party.
As incumbent Cebu City mayor, Mike is expected to have a big say in local LP party matters. A complication arises because Tommy leads the dominant BO-PK. To make matters worse, the BO-PK chieftain already announced his decision to run for city mayor and this has put a lot of pressure on the national LP.
My own take is, Mar pressed Tommy to officially sign the LP roster and attend party meetings because once he becomes a full-fledged member, the party could work out a peace settlement. In other words, Mar was looking at party arbitration as a solution to the Mike-Tommy conflict.
Either Mar overestimated his influence or didn’t do his homework because otherwise he would have understood that Tommy’s early announcement of running for mayor foreclosed the arbitration process that the LP leader cooked up in his head.
Before the Mar-Tommy tiff, I heard many people saying that with a hostile city council running rings around the incumbent mayor’s programs, it would be difficult for Mike to scrape even a modicum of success at the end of his first term. Rama will be remembered for having the shortest City Hall stint, they say. But with Tommy opting not to submit to the LP, Mike’s prospects have become different overnight. He can look forward to the full backing of the national administration party come 2013 and who knows what kind of impact it will have on BO-PK hardliners in the City Council.
When Tommy talked of “swimming alone” in next year’s elections, it could have been in reference to the unlikely scenario of his joining another party like the PDP-Laban, the party of Vice President Jejomar Binay. The Veep is cozy with the Garcias of Cebu and reports say that if Gov. Gwen Garcia, who is serving her last term, is interested in running for the senate, a slot in the PDP-Laban slate is hers for the asking.
Whatever it is, Cebu City’s mayoralty race has all the makings of a real blockbuster.
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The “Sustainable City Dialogues 2012,” a series of talks featuring two internationally renowned urban development experts opens today with a news conference at the West Gorordo Hotel. Urbanists Dr. Abdou Maliq Simone and Architect Senen Antonio, during the four-day event are expected to raise the level of citizen awareness about urban development planning.
According to web resources, the term urbanist is associated with an urban design movement that began in the United States in the early 1980’s.
“Principles such as traditional neighborhood design and transit-oriented development,” the so-called new urbanism is also closely related to “regionalism, environmentalism and the broader concept of smart growth.”
The movement advocates that “neighborhoods should be diverse in use and population; communities should be designed for the pedestrian and transit as well as the car; cities and towns should be shaped by physically defined and universally accessible public spaces and community institutions; urban places should be framed by architecture and landscape design that celebrate local history, climate, ecology, and building practice.”
We used to think that urban development should be left to government agencies, but after politics leached in the process, the way it is being perceived in the push for the construction of the flyovers in Gorordo and MJ Cuenco Avenue, the citizenry is now cognizant of its role in development.