EDITORIAL - Threats one thing, follow through another

A Cebu City councilor who seems to be all over the place is warning bars and similar establishments to renew their business permits by April 20 or else face closure. He is also warning the same establishments to comply with existing laws on sanitation, the sale of liquor, and even the building code. Why Dave Tumulak, who is just a mayor's deputy for police matters, feels he can take the cudgels for the entire bureaucracy is puzzling. But that is another story.

Anyway, let us just go back to his warning, the sound byte of which is admittedly impressive. Any threat of closure is like grabbing somebody by the collar: It seizes attention. Never mind if it is questionable whether Tumulak himself can effect the closures he has threatened. Maybe, as a mayor's deputy, he is making threats on behalf of his principal, the mayor, Tomas Osmeña.

Osmeña himself has been on a closure-threatening binge for some time now. Right off the bat this year, he threatened to padlock several bars and establishments at the height of the Sinulog and right after it for liquor sale and business permit violations and for being a public disturbance with their loud music. But after all the Sturm und Drang, a sudden quiet descended and everything seemed forgotten.

Not even a letter/appeal from a religious congregation operating a Catholic school right within ground-zero of the mayor's Sinulog wrath appears to have succeeded in compelling His Honor and His Honor's honorable deputy to revisit an old ordinance that prohibits the establishment of bars within a hundred-meter radius of any school or other institutions of learning.

It is too late now to rekindle the mayor's Sinulog wrath. And it is too early to see the results of his deputy's threats, the deadline being April 20 yet. So let us just be heartened by the warnings, and the possibilities they open. Maybe this time we will see real closures resulting from all these threats. Because if nothing still happens, then City Hall-made threats just might simply run out of style.

And that is very disappointing, considering that the mayor has made so many other threats other than those against bars and watering holes.

Maybe this is why the operational capacity to manufacture threats has been delegated and spread to include His Honor's deputies, with none more acutely enthusiastic in dispensing with his new responsibilities than the honorable deputy for police matters.