Iran office, nuns ask MMDA: Remove billboards, please

Even a foreign mission and a group of nuns are complaining.

The Iranian cultural office and the Philippine Province of the Good Shepherd have asked the Metropolitan Manila Development Authority (MMDA) to remove the giant advertising billboards near their respective properties in Makati and Quezon City.

MMDA Chair Francis Tolentino on Friday furnished the Inquirer copies of the request letters sent by the two organizations late last month. He said he had dispatched teams to investigate the matter.

The letter from Iranian cultural counselor Hossein Divsalar said his office had begun the renovation of its building along the southbound lane of Edsa in Makati, just across the highway from the MMDA headquarters in Orense, where a cluster of billboards “adjacent to the wall of our premises” now stands.

“We are concerned about the security as well as the beauty of our diplomatic location, so may we request the said billboard to be transferred in a reasonable distance from our site,” the official wrote.

Sister M. Cecilia Torres of the Good Shepherd nuns also asked the MMDA to remove another cluster of billboards near their convent and head office on Aurora Boulevard, Quezon City.

The billboards, which were erected on top of a building, posed “a threat to the safety of the sisters, residents and visitors of the convent,” Torres said in her letter to Tolentino.

“(The billboards are) lighted at night on steel structures that extend two meters beyond the wall of the building,” she said. “These structures encroach and are directly above the gate and main road of our convent.”

Tolentino, whose enforcement of billboard restrictions drew a complaint last month from the Outdoor Media Advocacy Group (Omag), said the agency’s drive against “illegal billboards” could become a long-drawn battle like those waged in major cities abroad.

He said the city government of Athens, Greece, for example, “took several years” before it solved the billboard problem there. “Had it not been for the (2004) Athens Olympics, they would not have been removed,” he said.

The city government of Los Angeles, California, had also been drawn into a similar legal battle against billboard builders, he noted.

The MMDA chair was sued by Omag for alleged usurpation of authority when he ordered the dismantling of certain billboards that the agency found to be in violation of the National Building Code.