Solicitation letter

HAS the Bando Osmeña- Pundok Kauswagan (BOPK) opened a can of worms in the administration of Mayor Michael Rama? The issue raised recently by Councilor Sisinio Andales about city hall allegedly soliciting donations of bottled water from establishments for the mayor’s State of the City Address (Soca) seemed to have acquired a life of its own.

It began with a copy of a solicitation letter supposedly sent to an establishment reaching Andales’s hands. “Once again we would like to ask your kind heart to share bottled water for the upcoming State of the City Address (Soca) of Mayor Michael Rama on July 1, 2015,” the first sentence of the short letter said.

It was dated June 16, 2015 and had the name of the mayor in it but without his signature. Below the phrase, “By Authority of the Mayor” was the name of Rama’s secretary, Belinda Navascues, with a signature above it. Navascues said she still has to find out if the signature was hers. She also denied that the city is soliciting bottled water from establishments for the mayor’s Soca.

That was where things started to turn messy. Navascues’s reaction virtually meant she was questioning the authenticity of the letter. The insinuation there is that Andales and the BOPK faked it to make the Rama administration look bad. That is not difficult to believe considering that the political pot in the city is starting to boil.

But a blanket denial won’t suffice. A letter exists and it can be used to find out who between Andales and Navascues is telling the truth.

If this is an issue manufactured by Andales and the BOPK, then they should rightly be condemned. But if Navascues is found out to have lied, then this would be her second miscue, the first one being her and city hall’s possible violation of a provision in Republic Act 6713 or the Code of Conduct and Ethical Standards for Public Officials and Employees.

Meanwhile, even before the bottled water issue could be resolved, another letter with a similar format was posted on Facebook, this time dated June 8, 2015 with the City supposedly soliciting donations of bread from establishments for the recent Independence Day activity.

The plot thickens.