BACOLOD City — Executive Assistant on Traffic Management Reynaldo Ebreo challenged Councilor Jose Carlos Lopez to “confront” him after the latter allegedly gave the media wrong information on vehicle body number stickers.
“Don’t make the issue out of proportion,” said Ebreo, also the Bacolod Traffic Authority Office (BTAO) chief.
Ebreo was reacting to a report in a Bacolod-based newspaper, published on Monday, wherein Lopez said that “failure to ‘buy’ the BTAO-distributed vehicle body number sticker constitutes a traffic violation.”
BTAO sells vehicle body number stickers at P150 for tricycles and P300 for public utility jeepneys (PUJs).
Lopez said BTAO was requiring all PUJs and taxicabs to buy the stickers; otherwise, the office would consider them “colorum.”
This prompted the City Council’s transportation committee chair to request the National Bureau of Investigation to conduct “an impartial investigation” on BTAO.
“This is a big lie. I never said this,” Ebreo said of Lopez’s claim. “We had a good conversation during the public hearing (conducted by the transportation committee),” he said. “You mentioned that BTAO is very laudable. [But] your statement that came out in the media was different. What’s this for, media mileage?”
Ebreo said buying the body number stickers is “voluntary” because there is no existing ordinance obliging a transport operator to do so.
But Ebreo said the absence of the sticker will cause delays. Vehicles without a body number sticker will be flagged down by BTAO personnel, who will then thoroughly inspect the vehicle’s documents, he said.
‘ILLEGAL’
He also said the stickers will help BTAO enforcers to easily determine “whether the vehicle is public or private” and if they are colorum or not.
Teddy Macainan, chair of the Alliance of Concerned Transport in Occidental Negros, said what the BTAO is doing is “illegal.”
Macainan said BTAO issues not an official receipt but an “ordinary out-of-the-counter receipt” for the purchase of the sticker.
Ebreo admitted that BTAO cannot issue an official receipt because the City Hall “did not invest a single centavo for the stickers.”
He said the BTAO sells the stickers on a “consignee basis,” wherein the office directly pays the supplier, which he identified only as “Espinosa.” Only the supplier can issue an official receipt, he said.
/PN
