AS this paper's editorial on Saturday discussed, the city of Dumaguete has been beset by a particularly unwise brainwave on the part of its mayor, Felipe Antonio Remollo, who apparently entered - or at least intended to - into a memorandum of understanding (MoU) with a Quezon City-based construction firm for the development of a P23-billion, 174-hectare reclamation project on the city's waterfront. Just about everyone, except the mayor, the city council members he cajoled into passing a resolution allowing the MoU and the aforementioned construction firm, thinks the idea is stupid and destructive, and they are probably correct.
The planned "smart city" - an infuriating, overused catchphrase that politicians use as though they believe it's some kind of magic spell - would, Mayor Remollo claimed, "uplift the lives of the people in Dumaguete, create more jobs, bring more investors in and hopefully, upgrade [Dumaguete's] status from currently being a third-class city."
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