Local officials who dismayed Pangasinenses

by Mario Mata

Why Dagupan City Vice Mayor Belen Fernandez sings a different tune these days?
Recently she was heard to say that she and majority of her allies at the City Council has just passed the  supplemental budget of P7,750,000 for the village chiefs and their constituents for them to join the Bangus Festival of 2011.
Was the changed of mind the result after Mayor Benjie S. Lim declared that if the Council would not passed the appropriation, he would use his own money to bankroll the Gilon-Gilon (Street Dance) traditionally and customarily participated by the 31 barangays?
Has somebody advised her not to make the mayor spent from his pocket because this would be another propaganda quo against her sagging political popularity?
Many Dagupenos took notice that the vice mayor played double-standard when she did not question the P3 million budget the council gave to her when she oversaw the Festival last year.
The P3 million budget should be the funds of Tourism and Cultural Heritage- front offices to attract tourists and employment in the city.
Fernandez and her ilk’s, er, allies put a zero budget to the Bangus Fest this year after they passed the obviously prejudiced downsized P487 million budget from the proposed P568 million.
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Pangasinenses are disappointed with their elected provincial officials. I overheard a political operator telling a politician to run for the vice governorship in the 2013 poll.
He explained to the attentive politician that Vice Governor Ferdinand Calimlim would not win in his re-election as he is one of those responsible why the scandalously spiraling Real Property Tax bled dries every Pangasinenses who pay the land tax.
Imagine, every body was howling after they learned that the 100% they paid became 300%. The P1000 became P4000, or the P10 thousand became P40 thousand. Thanks to the fast one called by political science students as rail-roading Calimlim and the members of the Sangguniang Panglalawigan had done.
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I heard there too that Calimlim is called as a political sissy.
Earlier last year according to the source, Calimlim went to the office of machine gun-mouth Board Member Ranjit Shahani. Shahani, who was a veteran savvy former congressman, lectured the vice governor that he should be working up to the wee hours.

Shahani was comparing his work rates as vice governor to the seemingly “lethargic” performance of Calimlim as the second higher provincial official.

Here’s another disappointment.
Another big political personality told me that Congressman Leopoldo Bataoil (Pangasinan, 2^nd District) has disappointed many of his constituents when he voted “No” for the Article of Impeachment against allegedly incompetent and corrupt Ombudsman Merceditas Gutierrez when five of congressmen –including Abono Representative Eskimo Estrella - who stayed in Pangasinan voted for the impeachment of Guiterrez at the Senate.

“Has Bataoil has a pending case at the Ombudsman?” I asked my source.
He told me in the affirmative.
He said the former chief of National Capital Regional Police Office was charged with the blunder of his policemen in Paranaque where they allegedly shot 16 people including Alfredo de Vera, a seaman, and his daughter Leah Alyana, 7 from Bayambang, Pangasinan after they cornered suspected robbers in the highway there.
(You can read my previous columns at http://dagupenosnews.blogspot.com/)