BY FREDA MAE SORSANO
ILOILO City – The comfort rooms are dirty. The toilet bowls are defective. The drainage pipes are clogged.
The garbage piles up. All the vendors agree – the city’s central market is messy.
During a dialogue with Mayor Jed Patrick Mabilog yesterday, the vendors wanted these concerns addressed.
There is an apparent lack of city government action to keep the central market sanitary, the vendors grumbled.
“The drainage system is a big problem. It is still clogged no matter how many times we dredge it,” a vendor complained.
The city’s health officer who also attended the dialogue agreed that there is a need to “sanitize” the central market.
“The market is unsanitary,” admitted Dr. Urminico Baronda, “It is smelly and dirty. The environment is unhealthy for marketgoers.”
The products being sold may be clean but if the market is not, customers will naturally stay away, Baronda added.
But he told the vendors that keeping the central market clean is not the City Health Office’s job.
“We want a clean central market. Who doesn’t? But there’s no water we can use to flush the dirt down the sewer,” a vendor said.
The vendors urged the city government to provide the central market with sufficient water supply, among other physical improvements.
But Mayor Mabilog was reticent.
“The city government is moving according to the budget,” he said, “We are supposed to get the money for these improvements from the market’s revenues. However, our records show that not all of the vendors pay their dues. Frankly, the market is losing.”
The vendors insisted they were paying. They demanded that the city government make public the central market’s financial records.
“Where is Vincent de la Cruz,” the vendors ask. “He should know where our money went.”
De la Cruz was the former chief of the city government’s Local Economic Enterprise Office (LEEO) that oversees all the public markets in the city.
In February, Mabilog removed de la Cruz from the LEEO following allegations of irregularities in the management of the public markets.
But the mayor has not lifted a finger to hold de la Cruz accountable for the alleged irregularities. He had in fact reassigned him to a plum post – as head of the city government office managing private-public partnership projects.
To temporarily address the central market’s sanitation problem, the vendors and the city government agreed to conduct a “do-day” this Saturday at 2 p.m.
“The market’s cleanliness is everybody’s responsibility,” said Mabilog. “We will device effective ways to have the market sanitized, but for the meantime, a do-day would do.”
All of the market vendors are obliged to participate in the cleanup./PN
