Progress goes on in Cabanatuan City

Jan. 5 was a red letter day in Cabanatuan, Nueva Ecija’s component city. The reason was the birthday of Julius Cesar Vergara, the best mayor the city ever had.

A man for others, Vergara took a crack at the mayorship in 1998 and won overwhelmingly. Confronted with a bloated and bankrupt bureaucracy, the businessman-turned politician embarked on a flurry of measures aimed at putting the city back on track.

Among the measures were the streamlining of the cashstrapped and bloated bureaucracy, ensuring transparency and accountability in the city government’s transactions, the adoption of the new tax revenue and investment code that authorized reasonable tax increase on business and real estate property.

As a result, the city government earned a whopping annual savings of P137 million from reorganization alone, enabling the city to offer retirement gratuities to its excess employees, expand the coverage of its services and programs for health, education, housing and livelihood (for the marginalized), food security and public safety, salary increase, additional benefits and logistical incentives to city employees. Vergara also caused the building and improvement of more roads and bridges, school buildings and other infra facilities.

Today largely due to the new network of roads and bridges and basic facilities and other investment comeons like stable peace and order, low business tax rates, one-stop shop and tax holidays for new business applicants, Cabanatuan’s development pace shifted to high gear as evidenced by the seemingly non-stop inflow of investments to the city, that brought with it revenues for the city coffers and direct and indirect work opportunities and in turn, a better quality of life for the city’s residents.

As a result, Cabanatuan has been cited by the Asian Institute of Management (AIM) as one of Philippine cities that attained “inclusive growth.”