Gov’t restarts segregating villages from John Hay

BAGUIO CITY—The new set of leaders appointed to the John Hay Management Corp. (JHMC) has restarted the process of segregating 13 villages nestled in the former American rest and recreation center here after 20 years of unfulfilled promises.

One of these villages is the city’s Ibaloi ancestral domain, which has been granted Baguio’s only Certificate of Ancestral Domain Title (CADT). Another village, a poor community, sits right beside the exclusive Baguio Country Club.

Because their villages lie within the Camp John Hay forest reservation, every barangay improvement project in those areas requires the blessings of the Bases Conversion and Development Authority (BCDA), which oversees all development in former American-controlled bases. JHMC is its subsidiary and is Camp John Hay’s estate manager.

But often, the proposals are tabled, “or we are never given time to present them even if it meant allowing us to build our own school,” said Dencio Almag, barangay captain of Country Club Village.

In the absence of a school, “our barangay hall is our school, our [community] stage is our school,” he said in an Aug. 18 dialogue with Leandro Yangot, a JHMC director.

Yangot said a new set of directors convened the JHMC board’s 99th session on July 18 to discuss the segregation of barangays Happy Hallow (a certified and duly registered ancestral domain), Country Club Village, Camp 7, Greenwater, Hillside, Loakan Apugan, Loakan Liwanag, Loakan Proper, Upper Dagsian, Lower Dagsian, Lucnab, Military Cut-Off and Santa Escolastica.

Segregating these communities from Camp John Hay is the fifth of a set of 19 conditions set by the Baguio City government, through Resolution No. 362, when it agreed to privatize Camp John Hay in 1994, documents showed.

Fulfilling this condition “is my top priority,” said Dr. Jamie Eloise Agbayani, acting JHMC president, on the sidelines of the Aug. 19 visit of President Aquino.

The new members of the JHMC board have close ties to Baguio, including its new chair, Silvestre Afable, former chief of the Presidential Management Staff.

Yangot, a former Baguio councilor, said records showed that the segregation plan was last addressed by the previous JHMC administrators in February 2007.

Scout Barrio, a major community settled by former Camp John Hay employees, was the 14th Camp John Hay barangay and it was the first to be segregated by former President Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo in 2001.

Yangot said Scout Barrio’s segregation was meant as the model for the segregation of the rest of the villages, but BCDA is still addressing resource-sharing concerns and overlapping land problems in the community.

“Not all the issues of [the 13 other barangays] are the same,” he said.

Yangot said villages whose residents have succeeded in titling their property would be easier to segregate by presidential proclamation.

But only a few Camp John Hay villages complied with a directive to survey their boundaries over concerns about how it would impact on the current size of their settlements, he said. Vincent Cabreza, Inquirer Northern Luzon