BACOLOD City – This city has received an allocation of P9.45 million from the national government for the rehabilitation and improvement of the Rizal Park located in front of the Rizal Elementary School on Araneta Street.
Mayor Evelio Leonardia led the unveiling of the design perspective during the rites marking the 159th birthday of national hero Dr. Jose Rizal on June 19.
“There is a program of the Department of Budget and Management that allocates billions for parks all over the Philippines. We were given an allocation for Bacolod. I recommended the Rizal Park again,” he said.
The project is included in the Local Government Support Fund-Assistance to Cities for 2019.
“We will implement this because this is the very purpose of the money. We will have this bid out,” said Leonardia.
The mayor said he hopes the project would be finished and inaugurated in time for the commemoration of the Rizal Day on December 30 this year.
He asked Rizal Elementary School principal Dennis Estaniel that once the Rizal Park is refurbished, they should ensure that it is preserved and maintained well.
“This project is going to further immortalize Jose Rizal. I hope that we will continue to preserve this. Let us make sure that it becomes an attraction in Bacolod,” Leonardia said.
Councilor Archie Baribar, the guest of honor and speaker, said Rizal was “not a hero by accident.”
“He was a purposeful man. He did things with the end-view that he can give something to his motherland. The only love that surpassed his love for his mother was his love for the motherland,” said Baribar.
He also shared a story about Rizal who made a statue when he was a child. When his sisters broke it, Rizal cried and said that someday he would make an image of himself in stone that could not be broken.
“Today, in almost all plazas of the Philippines, that statement became prophetic,” he added.
Rizal was born in Calamba, Laguna on June 19, 1861. (With a report from PNA/PN)
