Next to Boracay, Baguio needs rehab too – DOT

April 21, 2018 Headlines

BAGUIO CITY – The tourism department is looking into the city as the next area to be rehabilitated after Boracay.
Tourism Secretary Wanda Teo declared on national television over the weekend that Baguio City, being one of the top tourism sites in the country, is being considered by the national government for upkeep.
The mountain enclave, the country’s summer and vacation capital, records tourist arrivals at 1,521,748 up by 17.52 percent on 2017 compared to the 2016 data of 1,294,906 domestic and foreign tourists.
Tourist arrivals in Baguio City surpassed the tourism department’s national projection of 1,359,000 or 11.97 percent above the national projection.
Welcoming Teo’s pronouncement, City Councilor Elmer Datuin, who chairs the city council’s committee on tourism, said help from the DOT is needed and is long overdue.
Years ago, Datuin said, DOT vowed to help in subsidizing the upkeep of Burnham Park but funds did not come. He said that any help from the agency for the rehabilitation of the city is welcome.
The Cordillera office of the DOT has not issued any statement on Teo’s pronouncements and insiders claim Regional Director Venus Tan met with Teo about it.
Tan was instrumental in Baguio’s getting the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (Unesco) citation as part of the Creative City Network.
Baguio was chosen among 15 cities in the world in the field of craft and folk arts after its application months ago to the Unesco.
Earlier in 2013, a presidential task was formed for both for Boracay and Baguio, both tagged by the Palace as “fragile”.
Baguio then presented a development plan as well as current efforts to address issues on population growth and tourism.
Meanwhile, Mayor Mauricio G. Domogan emphasized that the situation of the city should not be directly compared with what happened in Boracay island because the situation in the two areas are totally different from each other.
He said, in the case of Boracay, there was a previous derogatory report from the Environmental Management Bureau (EMB) that tourism facilities in the said island do not have the appropriate waste water disposal facilities unlike in the city where there has been no derogatory report yet from the EMB because concerned government agencies and the local government are closely working together to address key environmental issues that must be corrected by tourism-related establishments.
Domogan said, the City Environment and Parks Management Office (CEPMO) is regularly conducting the required inspection of establishments to ensure that they are connected with the city’s main sewer system and not on the drainage system so that their waste water will be treated by the city’s sewerage treatment facility.
He added that the local government embarked on the put up of a separate sewage treatment plant for the waste generated by the city’s abattoir within the slaughterhouse compound to address the EMB’s recommendation for the put up of the said facility to separate the treatment of the huge volume of waste generated by the abattoir.
The local government and the Department of Public Works and Highways (DPWH) is also in close coordination for the planned put up of a sewerage treatment plant within the City Camp Lagoon area to cater to put in place the sewerage system in the various barangays surrounding the City Camp area. Ace Alegre with reports from Baguio PIO / ABN