What major insight have I gained so far from my ongoing experiences in engaging the initiative?
By: Thea Espidol
While I aspire to offer positive insight on the Mandaluyong City LGU, its usual operations, and the initiative on the Estrella-Pantaleon Bridge, I find it unfortunate that the only feedback I could give on the city that I grew up and currently reside in is negative–– all of their processes take longer than necessary, they lose files (whether hard or soft copy), and they are non-consultative to their constituents.
As the member of the group that is nearest to the assigned LGU and the consequent coordinator to the office, I have learned that their bureaucratic processes really take a while. I learned this the hard way, given that I had tried to go through the “honest” process and leave the letter as well as send an email to the Office of the Mayor and the Communications Department in spite of supposed personal connections at my disposal. Unfortunately, at the time of this writing, at almost a month later since I sent soft copy of our request letter on 28 October, they asked me to resend the email again, but with the guarantee that our group would be accommodated the following week.
In spite of the assurance that the group’s request is granted, it still is disappointing that the processing took that long to warrant either asking for help from direct contacts, or continuously following up that the group’s projected timeline gets constantly pushed back and the requirement ends up getting crammed somehow.
As the group furthers on in the research regarding the specific governance initiative, the fact solidifies that no one was consulted regarding this project before it was approved and it just happened somehow. It also goes to show that the officials within the Mandaluyong City LGU are immensely detached from the true state of their regular constituents since until today, the bridge is not yet done and is so far back in delays and the officials are not doing anything because they have not felt the drastic and highly inconvenient effects of their supposed developmental initiatives.
This spurs from the fact that there are new rerouting and one-way traffic schemes in some parts of Mandaluyong City that are supposed to be some of the alternate routes to get to neighboring cities until the completion of the Estrella-Pantaleon Bridge. To add to this, the direct attached access city to Mandaluyong City is Pasig City and with another bridge being constructed, there are little ways of immediately getting out of Mandaluyong without going through extreme traffic congestions.
To me, this speaks on both the level of a Public Administration student merely requesting for a fraction of their time for a class requirement and on the level of a constituent of the City of Mandaluyong for their lack of consultancy. This experience and the apparent detachment of officials to their constituents’ difficulties prove that wow, –– pardon my French –– we do have really shitty government officials who just prove on a daily basis that they do not give a rat’s ass about the average juan.