In 2013, Joseph Ejercito Estrada was enjoying his blissful retirement from politics and public service and was content in relaxing tasks of caring for his children and grandchildren, aside from writing bits and pieces of his memoirs, later to be turned into a book.
This book-writing endeavor led him to revisit his roots, as far back as the very beginning, meaning his birth at a hospital in Manuguit, Tondo, Manila.
“Erap” thought about the city of his birth, the people who gave him their support and loyalty when he was a struggling actor until a character from Tondo, “Asiong Salonga,” catapulted him to movie stardom in the 1960s.
Estrada realized that he owed so much from the ordinary masses of Manila, and when he realized how badly the principal city of the nation was managed and ruled then, he decided to make himself available again for another run in the local elections, this time in Manila.
And so Mayor Estrada started his planned 3-year-term on June 30, 2013, and is now on the cusp of starting his third and final term in 2019.
It is time, then, for the mayor to take stock of what he had done for the city, how far he had pushed with his original objective of putting Manila back in the map, of effecting an urban renewal for the city that would reclaim for Manila its original title of “Pearl of the Orient.”
Finding Manila bankrupt and more than P4-billion in deep debt when he started his administration, Estrada wanted to rescue the city from oblivion, bring back to Manilans the respect and dignity that they deserve, provide a livable environment, and set up the city which after all is the capital of the Philippines on its way to becoming world-class.
A year after, Manila received the award Most Competitive City in Metro Manila, and Estrada realized that his dreams for the city was bearing fruit.
Now the mayor is proud to have given the city its world-class health facilities and renovated hospitals, an efficient dialysis center, an MRI machine in Ospital ng Maynila, well-appointed health centers, and dedicated health professionals, doctors, nurses, etc. who are trained to help.
Modern public markets and parks with clean air-conditioned toilets, free education, tertiary level institutions, street lighting, flood control, waste management, in-city housing, residential land distribution, anti-drugs campaign, disaster preparedness, social welfare, assistance in burial, cemeteries and columbarium, job opportunities, livelihood programs, policies on ease of doing business, taxpayer services, tourism and cultural concerns, etc. are all in place.
To cap all these, Mayor Estrada and the City Council were able to pay off the millions of city liabilities.
Then, if there will be a so-called “Erap legacy” in the city of Manila, as Mayor Joseph Estrada girds for a third and final term as mayor of the nation’s capital, it would be a new map of the city with a couple hundreds of hectares of new land rising from Manila Bay, thanks to the latest technology in reclamation engineering.
This is in consonance with President Duterte’s massive infrastructure push called “Build, Build, Build.”
Through the years, Erap has been fairly successful in revitalizing the city, first by getting enough revenues to pay off its creditors of Lim-era liabilities then totaling P4.4 billion, and then restoring and bolstering basic social services to Manilans after making the city financially viable and debt-free.
As of latest count, there are five huge proposals in various stages of approval or implementation for reclaiming land in Manila. These are:
The 318-hectare commercial and tourism hub along the shorelines of Roxas Boulevard called “Manila Waterfront City.” This mixed-use development project is the fourth big-ticket reclamation venture approved under the Estrada administration in less than two years. Mayor Estrada signed a Memorandum of Understanding (MOU) with the Philippine Reclamation Authority (PRA) and real estate firm J-Bros Construction Corp. last June for the construction of a P100-billion, 419-hectare commercial district in another portion of the bay.
The Horizon Manila, touted to be the biggest reclamation project in Manila Bay so far, involves the construction of three islands between the Manila-Pasay boundary in the south and Roxas Boulevard in the east, stretching to about 3.5 kilometers on the edge of the bay.
A third reclamation proposal has been offered by the UAA Kinming Group Development Corp. It is called New Manila Bay International Community and will have a total of 407.42 hectares new land reclaimed from the bay.
Also planned is the P7.4-billion expansion of the Manila Harbour Centre in Tondo by the construction firm R-II Builders, Inc.
A fifth reclamation project, which had long been in the drawing board before Estrada’s term, is set to begin construction in Manila Bay – the 148-hectare Solar City urban center. Last January, the city council of Manila finally ratified the consortium agreement and the Joint Venture Agreement (JVA) signed by the city government and Solar City proponent Manila Goldcoast Development Corp. (MGDC) on April 7, 2012 and June 7, 2012, respectively. Solar City is a 148-hectare, state-of-the-art, tourism, commercial and residential district that will rise in Manila Bay to host business centers, residential and commercial properties, and tourism facilities, including an international cruise ship terminal.
Estrada realized that Manila’s land area has remained the same all these years, from the time of Spanish colonizers, up to the American and Commonwealth era, and onward to modern times — 42.88 square kilometers.
Adding to the problem is the presence of so many churches, mosques, houses of worship, government buildings, schools and colleges, both religious and secular, which are all exempted from taxes although some of them are being run as businesses.
Just like modern metropolitan areas such as Hong Kong, Singapore, and Cebu, the city of Manila needs to expand its land area to modernize and march to progress, Estrada said.
Once completed, these reclamation projects will increase the land area of the city to 58.3 square kilometers (5,830 hectares). From the point of view of taxation, these will be quality land because exempted lots such are churches and schools are relatively few, unlike in, say, Intramuros.
“All these reclamation projects will redound to the benefit of Manilans, first by providing the city with tremendous increases in real property tax revenues along with business and corporate taxes, and second, by generating jobs in the various businesses and enterprises for Manila’s jobless and new graduates entering the labor force,” said Mayor Estrada.
He added that increased tax collections will directly translate into more social services for the city, such as public health care, hospitalization benefits, subsidies for the elderly, cemeteries and schools, feeding programs for children, educational benefits, economic and livelihood opportunities for women, police and security matters, college and university education for residents, barangay programs, and a host of other concerns.
Rebuilding the city and restoring its principal role and image as the nation’s capital is no mean task, as Mayor Estrada is now realizing. Critics and nitpickers are everywhere, some even filing charges against him for the reforms that he would like to implement in Manila.
But Mayor Estrada, the tough guy that he is, is unperturbed. Once he set his mind into achieving a good dream, he will follow through on it. This is the kind of tenacity he displayed during his 16-year stint as mayor of San Juan. His dreams for Manila are a work in progress, as he realized that he needed one last term to finish them.
