In the recently Barkada Kontra Droga program sponsored by Dagupan City Vice Mayor Belen Fernandez at the Stadia in the same city, yellow t-shirts were distributed to guests and participants. At the back of the tees were huge group picture of smiling pro-Fernandez councilors who impliedly exhorts the public to join them in their fight against illegal drugs.
I overheard a media man over a bottle of Emperador Brandy who said that those images at the back of the tees were a posed for sheer hypocrisy.
“Some of the people there were users of illegal drugs!,” he quipped.
Is this accusation true? As a native of Mt. Tralala, this damaging accusation is new for me.
***
I heard from some media hao-shiao (fake media men) that Dr. Ruben Morante, owner of PASS College in Alaminos City, was looking for me in a press conference in Dagupan City where he was the guest speaker.
He was quoted to quote my last week’s blog (yes, to the traditional media, it’s blog in the internet, not your traditional column that saw prints in the mostly fly-by-nights newspapers in Pangasinan) where he reads my column on Alaminos City Mayor Nani Braganza. As a result of that blog, he said he would read his answers to the criticisms he got from Nani for the latter not to “lagari (saw)” him. Mayor Braganza, as a guest of Patrima’s Press Conference headed by Mrs. Lelia Sy, emphatically declared to all and sundry that he would sue Morante because of his libelous and slanderous remarked against him and his city.
I disagree with Morante’s statement that the City of Alaminos should not get a 30% share from the net revenue of the newly established Pangasinan State University in that city.
I found nothing anomalous on that arrangement inked on a Memorandum of Agreement between the Mayor and the leadership of the State University.
Alaminos bankrolled the construction of edifices, materials, and equipments of PSU.
It was a wise moved on the part of Nani . Alaminos would be earning another source of revenue that could even be used to fund more scholars to the same college, or elsewhere.
Dagupan City should emulate this smart move. She can build a college like the one owned by Urdaneta City.
Urdaneta University gives a windfall to the city coffer every year that her 2011 budget would shame the budget of every city in Region 1 now.
It even built recently a P220 million Sanitary Landfill that would see cities of Dagupan and Baguio as client for their heaps.
It even built a P3 million granite statue of a huge carabao menacingly guarding the intersections of her main thoroughfares. We can just pray that the water buffalo with its long sharp horns, a symbol of Urdaneta’s economic superiority, would not hurt the passers- by there.
With a city- run college in Dagupan, the city does not only earn another source of revenue but could be a buffer to universities and colleges in the city that exact prohibited fees from students. It could also be a benchmark for standard among some of the tertiary institution there that have been warned by the Commission on Higher Education because of their notoriety to produce graduates who could not pass a government sanctioned board examination.
(You can read my previous columns at http://dagupenosnews.blogspot.com/)
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