MMDA: We can be hard on smokers ‘a la Davao’

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The Metropolitan Manila Development Authority (MMDA) has expressed its willingness to be an enforcing agency when President Rodrigo Duterte signs the executive order (EO) imposing a nationwide smoking ban.

“We are hoping that we are deputized [by the Department of Health] to apprehend violators of the smoking ban in the metro. We hope we can be part of the enforcement since we already had an antismoking group under former MMDA Chair Francis Tolentino,” said MMDA General Manager Tim Orbos.

Health Secretary Paulyn Ubial earlier said her agency would be ready to come out with the implementing rules and regulations within 15 days after the EO is signed by the President.

Areas of focus

Once granted authority, Orbos said 50 MMDA personnel would be deployed throughout Metro Manila, especially at the corner of Shaw Boulevard and Edsa, Cubao and Balintawak.

The operation would be integrated with the agency’s antilittering campaign wherein violators are mostly people who throw their cigarette butts on roads and sidewalks.

“We are emulating the antijaywalking, antilittering and antismoking model of Davao City,” Orbos added, referring to the city where Mr. Duterte served as mayor for 22 years.

At least 8,000 violators were apprehended and fined within days after the MMDA implemented a Metro-wide smoking ban in public places in July 2011 through MMDA Resolution No. 11-19.

Legal hurdle

But Judge Carlos Jose of Mandaluyong Regional Trial Court Branch 213 issued a temporary restraining order on Aug. 15, 2011, based on the petition filed by security guards Anthony Clemente and Vrianne Lamson, who were fined P500 each by the MMDA for smoking on a sidewalk in Cubao, Quezon City.

In October that same year, the court issued a preliminary injunction for the MMDA to stop arresting persons who will be caught smoking in public places along major and secondary roads in the metropolis and in places not listed in Republic Act No. 9211 or the Tobacco Regulation Act of 2003.

In 2015, the Court of Appeals upheld the lower court’s decision and declared the MMDA resolution on the metrowide smoking ban invalid.

It also ruled that the MMDA was not one of the members of the Inter-Agency Committee on Tobacco that have the “exclusive power and function to administer the provisions” of RA 9211./rga