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Group wants to reclaim Cordi lot from squatters

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Philippine Daily Inquirer

12:03 AM June 22nd, 2015

ACCOMPANIED by Igorot dancers, about a hundred Cordillera students and upland professionals who used to be students, marched along downtown Baguio to declare they are reclaiming a Baguio lot that used to host Igorot dormitories from squatters.
EV ESPIRITU / INQUIRER NORTHERN LUZON

BAGUIO CITY—A group of students and their supporters on Saturday declared their intent to take back from squatters a downtown Baguio property intended exclusively for Cordillera students’ housing in 1960.

About 100 students, garbed in G-strings and the colors of various Cordillera tribes, stopped weekend traffic when they marched on Session Road led by a reconstituted Bibak Students Dormitories Inc.

Bibak is the acronym of the students’ home provinces—Benguet, Ifugao, Bontoc (the capital town of Mt. Province), Apayao and Kalinga, the subprovinces of the original Mountain Provinces.

“Bibak” for a time was a rallying cry for activists seeking an Igorot region during martial law.

Their symbolic home was the Bibak Dormitories on Harrison Road here.

“The government segregated the Bibak lot to serve Igorot students, who had to leave their villages to enroll in Baguio universities [in the 1960s and 1970s],” said Sonny Bugnosen, spokesperson of an interim Bibak council composed of Cordillera lawyers, musicians and businessmen.

He said the Bibak Student Dormitories Inc. used to run the student housing facilities. It regrouped in order to reclaim the 5,000-square-meter lot that was segregated by the government for student dormitories, which has since been occupied by a colony of squatters.

Unity

Since the creation of the Cordillera Administrative Region in 1987, Bibak (or the expanded Bimaak, to include Abra and to replace Bontoc with Mt. Province) became a term for upland unity, and was the name used by local and

international Cordillera organizations.

Some of the people who revived the Bibak Students Dormitories Inc. are Bibak chapter members living abroad.

Bugnosen said many of them were surprised on their return to the summer capital that the dormitory site had been occupied by illegal settlers.

Early this year, the city government had advised the settlers to leave, citing a 2013 resolution of the Cordillera Regional Development Council that required the property back for Cordillera student housing.

The Presidential Commission for the Urban Poor (PCUP) intervened.

But in an April 2015 letter to PCUP Chair Hernani Panganiban, City Administrator Carlos Canilao said the Baguio government would pursue demolition proceedings against the settlers, some of whom were migrants from Bulacan, Pangasinan and Mt. Province.

Canilao informed PCUP that the settlers have been profiting from the lot when they put up food stalls, variety stores, boarding houses and offices.

The Bibak lot also hosts a government building, which served as the session hall of the defunct Cordillera Regional Assembly (CRA), the legislative arm of an interim Cordillera government that was designed to prepare the region for autonomy in 1987.

In 1994, the Baguio City council investigated the CRA’s takeover of the Bibak lot.

The CRA stopped using the facility when Congress gave the legislative body and two other government agencies P1 budgets in 2000.

The hall has since served as the office of the village council of Barangay Harrison-Carantes-Claudio.

In 2011, the council urged President Aquino to grant the city government proprietary rights over the Bibak lot.

Bugnosen, however, said the Bibak Students Dormitories Inc. also intend to acquire land rights over the lot.

Rafael Wasan, a member of the interim council, said the city council in the 1960s had segregated the property for Bibak, “so we will simply pursue [the rights granted by segregation] so we can acquire the title over the lot.”Vincent Cabreza, Inquirer Northern Luzon

THROWBACK SERIES Baguio folks speak: Sobrepeña fooled the people, duped the gov't

Redeveloping Camp John Hay

:19 AM July 30th, 2014

CAMP JOHN HAY’S forest represents 50 percent of Baguio’s tree cover, and has served as an outdoor recreation site for various Baguio groups, like the Inquirer’s Read-Along session. EV ESPIRITU

The staggering amount of P1,588,855,553 was the winning bid tendered by the Manuela Lands and Housing Consortium on July 22, 1996 when the former American reservation Camp John Hay was leased out by the government—with Baguio City’s blessings.

About 240 hectares of built-up areas in John Hay were to become a tourism estate at a time when prime lands were at their peak.

But Manuela’s inexplicable withdrawal from the deal a month later might have been a first taste of how much trouble Camp John Hay, Baguio’s investment jewel, would become.

Penta Capital and the Fil Estate Management Corp., which offered the second highest bid of P425,001,378, inherited the project to develop the former base land, and formed the Camp John Hay Development Corp. (CJHDevco).

Eighteen years later, CJHDevco and the Bases Conversion and Development Authority (BCDA), the Camp John Hay administrator, are awaiting the results of arbitration proceedings ordered by a Baguio court, following a public spat over lease and the developer’s P3.4 billion outstanding rent debts.

Regardless of who the ruling would favor, BCDA would continue “bringing more business to John Hay,” said Jamie

Agbayani, president of the John Hay Management Corp., the BCDA estate manager of the John Hay Special Economic Zone.

A conceptual design for a “Camp John Hay 2.0” is due out in August for 40 ha of the estate that were not included in the areas leased to CJHDevco, she said.

It would explore the idea of redeveloping Camp John Hay into Baguio”s version of Central Park in New York City, Agbayani said, following a market study which shows that tourists return to Baguio for the cool weather and its remaining pine forests, 50 percent of which are inside the John Hay reservation.

First to be put on the auction block is Sheridan Drive, where JHMC is headquartered, and the Igorot Lodge, which has been leased to the Asian Institute of Management until 2018, Agbayani said.

A 3-ha property along Loakan Road is also being developed, she said.

But Baguio officials said they are not aware of these new plans. To them, Camp John Hay is about a feud of which city officials have not been involved.

BCDA president Arnel Paciano Casanova said he believed Baguio had played its role as mute bystander for far too long.

In a July 20 open letter published by a Baguio newspaper, Casanova said BCDA “has yet to hear the city fight for what rightfully belongs to its constituents,” after it filed one lawsuit after another against CJHDevco.

Challenge accepted

Baguio accepted Casanova’s challenge by again demanding an audit of Camp John Hay’s development.

Many old families also wanted to revisit the Camp John Hay master development plan that convinced Baguio to endorse its privatization.

“On hindsight,” said retired city architect Joseph Alabanza, “perhaps the fourth tender (P253,889,888 made by Ayala Land Inc.) approximated the kind of development we wanted for John Hay.”

Alabanza was Cordillera regional director of the National Economic and Development Authority (NEDA) when Camp John Hay was relinquished by the American military in 1991, shortly after the Senate rejected the extension of the Philippine-United States military bases agreement.

It soon became one of the government’s most attractive real estate properties, which concerned a city that was rebuilding from the Luzon earthquake in 1990.

The NGO Congress, an assembly of civic groups, nongovernment organizations and Baguio families, drew up a development framework for the summer capital, which discouraged high rises and promoted low density improvements.

Still attractive

Alabanza said that sentiment crossed over to the planning stages of the Camp John Hay lease.

Years earlier, city folk rallied to block the entry of the Tuntex Group of Taiwan, a foreign developer that intended to build a P2-billion theme park.

Conscious about the Anti-Tuntex Movement, a bloc of Baguio officials sought to regulate the density of buildings and other facilities to be built inside Camp John Hay, said lawyer Damaso Bangaoet Jr., former president of the John Hay Poro Point Development Corp (JPDC), the precursor of JHMC.

But Camp John Hay remains an attractive business venture.

Ayala Land Inc. had since returned to Camp John Hay as a JHSEZ locator to build the Ayala Baguio Technohub, which has increased revenues here.

Agbayani’s 2013 asset management report said Ayala helped raise the number of JHSEZ locators from 103 in 2012 to 110 last year, and the combined rental earnings that amounted to P25.7 million last year.

But Baguio remains suspicious. Early in July, Domogan directed the city legal office to determine whether BCDA had fulfilled its promises to Baguio, after observing that the city government had not received its 25 percent share from Ayala’s rent.