City of San Juan after Wuhan

By March 15 of this year, all the Metro Manila local legislative councils, or the Sangguniang Bayan were supposed to come out with their respective amended ordinances to implement unified fines and penalties in the 20 identified common traffic violations. However, San Juan Mayor Francis Zamora, elected president of the Metro Manila Council (MMC), reported only eight of the 17 local government units (LGUs) in Metro Manila have legislated the unified traffic fines and guidelines to govern the contiguous areas of jurisdiction at the national capital region (NCR).

Dubbed as the “Single-Ticketing System” (STS), the electronic traffic citation project will cover and will be implemented in all the 16 Metro Manila cities and the municipality of Pateros by April 30 this year. Mayor Zamora announced this last Wednesday at the Kapihan sa Manila Bay news forum at Cafe Adriatico in Remedios Circle in Malate. Mayor Zamora disclosed the city government of San Juan has already approved the local ordinance for STS.

Although only half of the Metro Manila LGUs have met the agreed “timeline” by the MMC, the STS project will still have its scheduled dry-run next month after the Holy Week period, Zamora hastened to add. “It (STS) took 28 years in the making to finally implement this because the present Mayors now in Metro Manila are more receptive,” Zamora cited.

 The Metro Manila Mayors are undertaking the STS project jointly with the Land Transportation Office (LTO) and the Metro Manila Development Authority (MMDA), Zamora explained. Once the STS is fully implemented, all the traffic enforcers of the LGUs, the MMDA and the LTO will no longer confiscate the driver’s license for any traffic offense. Traffic enforcers will be able to use handheld devices – already connected to the database of the LTO – for issuing traffic violation tickets. Traffic offenders will be able to pay fines electronically by using the said handheld devices. 

 Traffic violators have also the options of paying the fines online through G-Cash or Pay Maya, or manually by going to City Hall. Thus, Zamora believes, there will be lesser human intervention on traffic violations and reduce –  if not prevent “kotong” and other corrupt practices by both unscrupulous motorists and traffic enforcers.

To lead by example, he cited, he signed already the ordinance approved by the San Juan City Sangguniang Council that lowered the traffic fines following the STS schedule of fines.

Adding new roles to him came after Malacanang recently designated Mayor Zamora as the chairman of the Regional Peace and Order Council (RPOC) for the NCR, and concurrently as the vice chairman of the Regional Development Council (RDC) for NCR.

Mayor Zamora disclosed he intends to get the “best practices” of his fellow Metro Manila Mayors that they share with each other at the MMC meetings. These would help him in his new twin roles at the RPOC and RDC in dealing directly with the national government agencies, he pointed out.

Also on this same date – March 15 three years ago – the city of San Juan joined the rest of the Philippines in remembrance of the nationwide lockdown following the COVID-19 pandemic. It was a few days earlier, or on March 11, 2020, Mayor Zamora vividly recalled, when he got an emergency call from the Department of Health (DOH). He was given “classified information about the first case of local COVID transmission” in the country.

It was traced to “Patient No.5” who went to the Muslim prayer hall in Greenhills Shopping Center located in the city of San Juan. The man and his wife known as “Patient No.6” were taken to the Cardinal Santos Hospital also in San Juan City. Unfortunately, the couple became the first casualties of the COVID-19 pandemic in the Philippines.

Patients 1 to 4 were the nationals from Wuhan, China who flew to our country and spent here their Chinese Lunar New Year. They were the first cases of the deadly coronavirus disease that originated from the ground zero of infection traced in the City of Wuhan. The Wuhan COVID was the first strain of this highly transmissible virus that spread rapidly across the world.

As the COVID epicenter, Mayor Zamora painfully related, the city got stigmatized as the “Wuhan sa San Juan.”

“Because we’re the site of the first COVID, I made a strong push to get back to the normal. We need to reverse the image of San Juan from COVID,” Mayor Zamora pointed out.

According to him, City Hall distributed food packs and “ayuda” to 45,000 households living its 21 barangays in “20 waves” and close to 12,000 public school students got free tablet units each for the “blended learning” during the pandemic period.

 He narrated he even joined the city government in undertaking a door-to-door vaccination. Unfortunately, in March last year, he contracted COVID. He was asymptomatic though. The anti-COVID jabs campaign were done mostly at the health centers and school grounds all over San Juan. Having the lowest vaccine hesitancy, he explained, San Juan City became the first at the NCR to achieve more than 70 percent herd or population immunity.

Mayor Zamora swore the city has low volume of vaccine wastage since excess doses were donated to its neighboring LGUs and to other provinces. In fact, he cited, the 13 public schools of the city re-opened the face-to-face classes in August last year, or three months ahead of the schedule set in November by the Department of Education.

Looking back during the pandemic taking place on his first term of being Mayor, the 45-year old Zamora was only thankful for the wealth of experience he gained in taking care of the welfare and interests of his 150,000 or constituents. That’s the day-time population, Mayor Zamora quipped, saying the number could go up to 200,000 at night-time when residents return to home in San Juan City coming from work, schools, or elsewhere in Metro Manila.

In turn, the people of San Juan City gave him a second term mandate at City Hall with his entire slate of 15 councilors.

The city of San Juan after Wuhan is back to normal, Mayor Zamora raves.