Oca, of course

NO SURPRISE is the City of San Fernando landing in the Top Ten among all local government units – provincial, city, municipal and barangay – in the country in the Gawad Galing Pook for exemplary governance for 2008.
What could have been a surprise – and an unforgiveable offense at that – is the City of San Fernando not being in the Top Ten.
For one, awards of excellence have become a tradition for the city. It now appears that the good governance category in any award-giving body will be so much wanting, in luster, in substance, in merit, without the City of San Fernando at the podium. In the Gawad Galing Pook, this is already the city’s second under the leadership of Mayor Oscar S. Rodriguez. The first, in his first term, in the aspect of cultural heritage preservation. The accolade this time is for the institutionalization in the city of the public governance system (PGS).
In August last year, at the Public Governance Forum of the International Solidarity in Asia (ISA), the city took center stage as one of the four “best local government units to provide the best business opportunities to investors.” The others being the cities of Marikina, Naga and Tagbilaran.
That recognition is conferred by ISA to local government units that have streamlined their local investment programs to accommodate and provide the best atmosphere for investors. That recognition is in effect an affirmation of that which was bestowed upon San Fernando in 2006 and 2007 by the Philippine Chamber of Commerce and Industry as “the most business-friendly city in North Luzon.” And further reaffirmed with the city government hailed by the Central Luzon Growth Corridor Foundation for its “excellent implementation of streamlining procedures in the issuance of business permits.”
These, and all the undertakings of the city government, are anchored on the PGS. For those still perplexed over the PGS, it simply means good governance at work, Magsilbi Tamu (Let us serve) actualized.
Here’s a re-take of what we have written in an editorial here last year under the title “Oca defines good governance.” It resonates even louder today with the Gawad Galing Pook for the PGS.
“…the recognition is a monument to the integrity of the city administration and a testament to the efficacy of the kind of good governance that Mayor Rodriguez espouses. Good governance that is not flimsily based on the grandiosity of verbiage but solidly grounded on a public governance system with civic responsibility as core value. This, concretized in a multi-sectoral governance council (MSGC) representative of all the socio-economic strata of the Fernandino community, working on set, measurable goals aligned with the city’s development agenda.
No simple captive civil society kowtowing to the local government’s wishes is the MSGC but a critiquing, coordinating, consulting, and working assembly.
It was with the MSGC that the roadmap and scorecards – basic implements in the public governance system that was birthed at Harvard University – of the City of San Fernando were crafted soon into Mayor Oca’s first term. It is with the MSGC that these are now being implemented.
The results are obvious. From a virtual state of bankruptcy in June 2004, the city government has not only increased the content of the public coffers but moreso raised the quality of life of the Fernandino with marked improvement in health care and education, better infrastructures as in the area of flood control, the preservation of peace and order.
All that auguring well for the city to reclaim its pre-eminence as top investment area in the region outside the Freeport zones.
The City of San Fernando is soon to be institutionalized – the first ever in the country – in the global public governance system in Washington, D.C.
Even without that supreme accolade, now obtains in the Fernandino a substantiated “pride of place” far and superior, nay, incomparable, to the empty “…pagmaragul ku” (...I am proud of) on the provincial level.”
Recently, from third class, the City of San Fernando has been elevated to the status of first class component city – in but three years since Mayor Oca took over its helm! That is PGS again at work there.
Indeed, as we wrote then: “NO, HE did not have to be a poster boy of a national newspaper. Neither did he have to fraternize with other propaganda props of some elitist academic bastion. Nor move around the country giving campus talks. All in the propagation of the ideal of good governance.
Mayor Oscar S. Rodriguez of the City of San Fernando did one better than all those self-anointed, media-crafted purveyors of good governance combined: He walked the talk. He breathed and lived good governance.”