Baguio in the time of Domogan

‘Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.’ In Baguio today, it's more like - those who choose to ignore history cannot learn from it.

Here's a portrait of today's Baguio: a tiny highland city a kilometer and a half or so above sea level with an estimated resident population of half a million with hardly enough resources to sustain such a huge population, its carrying capacity further burdened by tourists whose numbers can go as high as a million on occasion, water has been rationed since time immemorial where most households receive water only for a couple of hours once a week, a city facing a waste management crisis and its administrators are hardly doing anything substantial to address the problem, pollution levels are at an all time-high and continue to rise, crime is also on the rise and, perhaps with the exception of the few years under Japanese occupation, the quality of life of its residents are at an all-time low.


Fairly recent developments - City Hall approved and defended a mall's planned expansion which had almost two hundred trees, most of which are decades-old pine that served as one of the few remaining forest covers in the city's central business district, the Rose Garden at Burnham Park was "developed" which significantly reduced its natural space and replaced with concrete and a dancing fountain, the city's congressman caused the death of hundreds of pine trees in a forest reserve and the contamination of the areas water resources compromising the welfare of thousands of residents, and its aesthetically-challenged, shortsighted, unsentimental Mayor who has occupied various seats in the local government of Baguio for more than two decades is determined to trample on the historical value of two heritage sites: the Baguio City Hall (where they want to build a fence around it and concrete structures right in the tree-covered gardens that beautifully frame the government building) and the Melvin Jones Football Grounds (that the Mayor think nothing about digging up to erect a parking facility - his solution to the city's worsening traffic situation).


It is interesting to note that the current mayor, Mauricio Domogan, seem to be obsessed with parking facilities having figured prominently in the Jadewell on-street parking fiasco that caused his erstwhile political sidekick, Bernardo Vergara, the mayoralty but he was lucky enough to survive the backlash and still bagged the city's lone congressional seat in the 2004 elections).


Both the Baguio City Hall and Burnham Park where the football grounds eyed as the site for this parking facility is located are declared heritage sites - as such, any improvements, alterations, construction activity must go through and be approved by the National Historical Commission of the Philippines (NHCP). Why?


I was fortunate enough to have been able to visit Paris, France as a young man, and I will never forget the experience. Perhaps it worked to my advantage that this was way before the advent of digital cameras, so I took in all of that Parisian visuals with my eyes and not through an lcd screen and saved all of it in my mind and not in some memory card, the reason why I can still vividly recall not only the images but the whole experience itself.


Paris has a soul, it is alive and the city speaks to you, it tells you her story with every cafe, building, park, boulevard and side street. All infrastructures in the city complemented the city's heritage, its feel, its soul. Two major structures built a century apart do jump out of the renaissance painting that is the Parisian skyline: the Eiffel Tower and the Louvre.


Mayor Domogan is not proposing to build an Eiffel Tower and a Louvre. Not at all.


At the City Hall grounds, he wants a fence that will serve as "protection" from vandals and is not meant to deny the public access to the grounds. A stage is also part of the this improvement design "to be used by performers..." Local advocacy groups have denounced the project. Mayor Domogan defended it saying that the construction project is not meant to deface a historical site and that this will, in fact, enhance its historical value.


Why am I not buying that? I just have to look at the "improvements" done at the Rose Graden in Burnham Park where parcels were cemented over reducing the area's natural space significantly and and how the place ended up with a "dancing fountain" but much less roses. I have just to look up at the mostly empty flyover at the Baguio General Hospital rotunda and the traffic jams right below it. I have not gotten over the hideous concrete pine tree at the top of Session Road (the construction of which was lauded by Domogan and its eventual removal by another mayor he denounced so vigorously). The man just can't be trusted with a backhoe and a cement mixer. Who knows what he's got up his sleeves this time.


Let's not forget his proposal to put up gates on top of the fences around the whole of Burnham Park.
At the Melvin Jones grounds, the proposal is multi-level underground parking facility, with shops and other commercial establishments on ground level, and a rooftop with artificial turf so "football may continue to be played." I first heard it from on of the horses' mouth, so to speak, soon after the 2010 elections when then congressman-elect Bernardo Vergara announced during the opening of a football tournament their (his and Domogan's) plan to construct an underground parking facility in the area.


Mayor Domogan refuses to acknowledge, and this sentiment is shared by much of the councilors who have either come out to support the ridiculous proposal or have said nothing at all about it, the area's historical value. He also doesn't see the aesthetic value of a wide open space surround by towering trees. He also ignores such an area's ecological value and what could happen if such a huge rainfall catch-basin, aquifer, carbon sink is cemented over. He just has to have his parking lot.


In the meantime, City Hall prohibits activities such as football and other similar sports to be played there as these result in the destruction of the lawn. No football in the football grounds, but yes to destroying it totally and building a parking building?

Baguio was much like Paris in a way before - it had a distinct character. Vestiges of both its colonial past and indigenous heritage against backdrop of pine forests. The city even had a distinct aroma. The cool climate is fast becoming Baguio's only tourism draw and that's why we need to come up with events such as Panagbenga to prop up the industry. Soon, as more cars ply the streets or get caught in traffic jams spewing carbon in the air, that cool climate might just go too for as early as now, we have been experiencing temperatures north of the thermometer that most Baguio folks never experienced before.


Paris has managed to keep its character while our current administrators seem to be doing all they can to destroy Baguio's. Session Road used to be a showcase of Baguio's colonial past - but not anymore, viewing the historic road from any angle today only offers a noisy collage of over-sized commercial billboards. They ignore the very laws that they are supposed to enforce to satisfy their conscience-less capitalist cohorts. Much noise was created about that new building on Session Road that violated the permit issued to its owners who built additional floors on top that exceeded that number of floors that those same owners originally applied for. After much noise? Nothing, it's business as usual.


There's very little left of what Baguio is all about, and Mayor Domogan is determined to erase all that. He's no urban planner, he's no engineer, he's no architect, he obviously doesn't have an artistic sensibility, or any eye for aesthetics, yet his administration has all been about infrastructure. Ugly infrastructure. He's a lawyer, but that doesn't even come into play when it comes to legally defending the city from abuses such as SM City Baguio's insistence on making the biggest commercial establishment in the city even bigger at the expense of the welfare of the people.


The city's heritage cannot and must not be ignored, and I'm not only talking about old buildings and parks here. I'm talking about all the past administrators of Baguio who made sure that the city progressed without sacrificing the city's heritage, its raison d'etre and most importantly the welfare of its citizens. That is a very important aspect of the city's history, and Domogan must ignore that, must learn from that.

We inherited a beautiful city from those who came before us, we cannot, must not allow Domogan to hand over a decaying city to our children on behalf of our generation. Because that's what it all boils down to - we are turning over a dying, soul-less Baguio to our children.