BAGUIO CITY – The city is slowly climbing up the success ladder of the National Competitiveness Council (NCC) after it rose to 11th place among highly urbanized cities and 13th overall among all cities in the country.
Mayor Mauricio G. Domogan said the latest ranking of local governments in terms of competitiveness released by the NCC is a welcome development on the part of city officials but there is still a need to further improve the city’s performance in some important indicators.
Last year, Baguio City placed 14th among the 33 highly urbanized cities and 15th among all the 142 cities that were assessed for their competitiveness in terms of economic dynamism, local governance and infrastructure development.
“We are elated that our efforts to sustain our competitiveness in terms of the prescribed criteria is gaining ground as the city continues to improve its ranking. However, we should not be complacent in the present situation where we are in because we still need to do a lot of improvement in many aspects of the criteria,” Domogan stressed.
Baguio bested other bigger highly urbanized cites like Muntinlupa and Cebu based on the results of the latest competitiveness ranking released by the NCC last week.
Domogan underscored the local government needs to further improve its standing on governance through the enactment of the necessary legislations that will update the city’s outdate policies.
Further, he added in terms of economic dynamism, the city must already updates its 21-year old schedule of market values and 16-year old revenue code to improve and maximize the generation of more resources that could be used by the local government in funding the implementation of more development projects and enhancing the delivery of basic services to the people.
In terms of infrastructure development, he noted the need for the local government to improve its performance in the implementation of the projects that were provided the funding from the city’s local development fund and other sources of fund considering the low performance of the city in the implementation of programmed projects aside from the backlog from the previous budgets.
He ordered concerned offices of the local government to look into the unimplemented projects and the reasons behind the delay in the prosecution of the projects so that appropriate solutions could be adopted to make sure that the delayed projects will be implemented to be utilized by the prospective beneficiaries, especially those from the city’s 128 barangays.
He expressed confidence that Baguio City will be able to further improve its competitiveness ranking and will be at par with much bigger and larger highly urbanized cities once concerned offices will be able to continue putting things in their proper perspective to ensure the effective and efficient delivery of services to the people coupled with the sustained implementation of more development projects that will cater to the rapid growth in the city’s population. /By Dexter A. See
