The city council on Monday sent to President Rodrigo Duterte the city government of Baguio’s appreciation and gratitude for the P200 million financial assistance from the President’s socio-civic projects fund for the 911 Command Center (phase 1) to be established at the Baguio City Disaster Risk Reduction Management Office building. The check has been handed over to Mayor Benjamin Magalong.
The 911 command center was designed to achieve the feature of an ideal unified communication center to replace the existing command center, which lacks digital platform, with limited alert methods, and still using information silo, which runs like an information center.
The council members and the city mayor, with their good working relationship, are supportive of the speedy implementation of the project to ensure the realization of the needed details of a modern command center, such as analytics platform for Contela, Cisico Kinetic for cities, outdoor pointtilt and zoom, CCTV camera package, and servers.
Further, the officials are confident that the modern center would create positive impact on peace and order, emergency response, and disaster and traffic management consistent with Executive Order 56, s. 2018, which institutionalized the Emergency 911 hotline as the nationwide emergency answering point.
In separate resolutions, Magalong was authorized to represent the city government in the signing of memorandums of agreement with agencies for worthy endeavors.
One is through Resolution 427, s. 2018 for an agreement with the Department of Transportation for the operation and management of Loakan Airport.
Built in 1934, Loakan Airport was closed for commercial flights after the 1990 earthquake and due to flight risks during bad weather. The airport is open only to chartered and military flights.
The national government is eyeing and programming the airport for repair and upgrading to accommodate regular commercial flights, which is instrumental in boosting the conti-nued growth and development of the city’s and its neighboring towns’ tourism industry.
The other agreement is through Resolution 438, s. 2019 with the Department of Social Welfare and Development for the adoption and implementation of the DSWD Yakap Bayan Framework of Intervention in the city.
Yakap Bayan is a framework developed by the DSWD which uses a whole-of-nation approach to transform recovering persons who used drugs from surrenderers into advocate, and eventually productive community leaders.
The framework was proven effective and successful in six sites where it was implemented, reason why many local government units are adopting the same.
The success of the intervention is attributed to its well-defined implementation strategy, which provides a clear direction and trajectory; it integrates local culture into solutions; and it uses available resources of local government units and their stakeholders to provide a concrete and sustainable system of rehabilitation, reintegration and continuum of care for recovering persons who used drugs, and support measures for the strengthening of families and communities.
Meanwhile, the Baguio City Police Office, through Resolution 410, s, 20-19, was asked to finalize its master action and patrol plan in combating and preventing crimes, called Oplan Somabat.
One of BCPO’s major anti-criminality and prevention programs, Oplan Somabat aims to incorporate the movements of all mobile cars and beat patrollers to bring them in different areas of the city where and when their combined strength are most needed as an added strategy to its campaign in decreasing and preventing crimes in the city.
The plan aims to benefit the community in terms of peace and order just like the other police activities like Oplan Cross-Rider, Enhanced Managing Police Operations, and Oplan Tambuli.
Based on the records presented by the BCPO, the operational plans cannot be discounted as an effective strategy in battling crimes. Their intense implementation since 2016 has continuously decreased crime rates, especially theft from 1,385 to 62, and robbery from 334 to 12 as of May this year.
In Resolution 416, s. 2019, the Land Transportation and Franchising Regulatory Board was urged to conduct an actual ocular inspection, along with concerned punong barangays and a representative from the BCPO, on the submitted sketch and photo of the public uti-lity vehicle garage presented when registering their vehicles.
The request is pursuant to Resolution 203, s. 2015, which urged the LTFRB, the Department of Transportation, and the Land Transportation Office to strictly implement their policy of non-registration or non-renewal of registration of motor vehicles without showing the actual proof of the presence of a garage by its owner.
Adding members to the inspection group is also a way of verifying and ascertaining the integrity/truthfulness of applicants due to reports that many vehicle owners are showing and submitting proofs of garage which are not their own.
May 9, 2024
