Utility co-op can’t collect as town seeks tax payments

LINGAYEN, Pangasinan—Officials of an electric cooperative in Pangasinan province have asked the provincial government to intervene so they won’t have to disconnect power in San Carlos City due to the city’s failure to pay P174 million in electric bills.

Rodrigo Corpuz, Central Pangasinan Electric Cooperative Inc. (Cenpelco) officer in charge, said the cooperative needed to collect P174 million from the city government while San Carlos City officials were also demanding the payment of at least P200 million for supposed unpaid taxes.

Corpuz said Cenpelco was “exhausting all possibilities” to resolve the issue, which he said started in the 1980s, because it did not want to cut power to the city government.

“As much as possible, we do not want to take the drastic action of disconnecting the power supply of the city,” he said.

Corpuz said the unpaid taxes that the San Carlos government had assessed the cooperative included real property taxes on land, buildings and electric poles, and business and franchise taxes.

“But there are portions in the taxes being collected that we want to clarify, such as revenues that are nontaxable and universal charges that are remitted to the Bureau of Internal Revenue (BIR),” he said.

Corpuz said that if the city government pressed Cenpelco to pay, the cooperative would be forced to pass on the taxes to its consumers.

San Carlos City Mayor Julier Resuello said the 5-hectare property where the Cenpelco office and equipment stand now belonged to the city after it was foreclosed five years ago.

“The city government had assumed ownership of the property five years ago because of unpaid real property taxes. If you will compute the rental at P18 per square meter, that would be P900,000 a month. Compute that at five years, and Cenpelco owes the city P54 million for rental alone,” he said.

The taxes that Cenpelco has been paying to the BIR, he said, are different from those due to the city government.

Resuello said he was ready to appear in the provincial board’s session. Yolanda Sotelo, Inquirer Northern Luzon