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CEBU CITY, Philippines – Cebu City Vice Mayor Michael Rama on Sunday admitted it would take a while before City Hall could implement a City Council resolution that called for the removal of the controversial decorative lampposts along city streets.
But Rama said he was not worried at all. He said that as far as he was concerned, what was more important was that “the resolution was already served” by making it known to everyone that the city was not involved in the alleged corruption that surrounded the overpriced lampposts.
Decorative lampposts costing P365 million were installed by the Department of Public Works and Highways (DPWH) in the cities of Cebu, Mandaue and Lapu-Lapu as part of the beautification program when Cebu hosted the 12th Association of Southeast Asian Nations Summit in January last year.
The Office of the Ombudsman and the Commission on Audit later found the decorative lampposts to be grossly overpriced, leading to the filing of graft cases before the Sandiganbayan against former Mandaue City mayor Thadeo Ouano, Lapu-Lapu City Mayor Arturo Radaza, eight engineering personnel in the two cities, and nine officials of the DPWH in Central Visayas.
The Cebu City government had left the installation of the lampposts entirely to DPWH and was thus spared from the scam.
The City Council, in a resolution introduced by Rama on September 24, declared the lampposts as symbols of corruption and should be removed from the city's streets.
The lampposts should instead be kept in a safe place rather than have these displayed in the streets unlighted and subjected to graffiti or destruction by burglars, the City Council said.
Rama, however, said he has since learned that all legalities should first be settled before the city uproots the lampposts.
City Administrator Francisco Fernandez, who was designated by the council to head the task force that would uproot the lampposts, had said that he planned to meet with officials of Office of the Ombudsman in the Visayas today to explain the position of the city and discuss legalities, particularly since the matter is out of the Ombudsman's jurisdiction and already with the Sandiganbayan.
