The truth behind the Seedling Bank takeover

Quezon City administrator Vic Endriga sent a letter reacting to this column of July 11, 2012 about the takeover by the city government of the lot owned by the National Housing Authority (NHA) and leased to the Manila Seedling Bank Foundation (MSBF). He said the city government gave the NHA and MSBF all the opportunities to settle the real estate tax delinquency on the property before selling it in a public auction.

“The foundation is not a charitable institution as you may have been led to believe,” Endriga wrote. “It derives income from its sale of seedlings and from rentals of some portions of the 69,759 square meters it occupied.”

I beg to disagree. The MSBF may not be listed as a charitable institution but what it is doing is charitable. In fact, that is the reason President Ferdinand Marcos made it tax exempt when it was created and allowed the use, under usufruct, of the NHA property on Quezon Avenue. It may be true that it sells the seedlings and rents parts of the property to gardeners who also sell their plants to the public; but the income from them is not profit, it is plowed back to maintain the nursery. That was the reason President Marcos created it in the first place—to grow seedlings and sell them to the public at very low prices. It is no secret that the country lacks trees and is still losing them to illegal loggers and charcoal makers, and the national and QC governments have no agencies similar to what MSBF is doing.

The government should be doing what the MSBF is doing, instead it is denying the people access to cheap seedlings and ornamental plants. In fact, the city government has no replacement for the functions of MSBF once it takes over the property.

In answer to criticisms of the takeover, the QC government said the gardeners who would be ejected from the property can be transferred to the Quezon Memorial Park. What, crowd that tiny park more? That park is being abused by the present city administration. It is putting so many structures inside the park (to give favored contractors projects?), leaving the public with little space for grass, open space and fresh air. Parks are supposed to be open spaces with lots of greenery where the people can escape the dingy confines of their crowded homes and neighborhoods, which most of Quezon City is becoming.

What the QC government and other local government units should be doing is to establish more parks because many of their jurisdictions, especially Metro Manila, are becoming very crowded concrete jungles. Other cities in the world buy privately owned lots to develop them into parks. What we are doing is sell public land—which belong to the people, not to the government—to land developers who are racing to convert the whole country into concrete jungles.

In fact, that is the reason the QC government seized the MSBF lot in the first place. The city government does not need the money to be derived from MSBF’s real property taxes. It has so much money such that councilors and other shady characters at City Hall are thinking of ways to get some of it for themselves. Two of these ways are to hire ghost employees (for which two councilors are already being prosecuted by the Ombudsman) and to concoct projects for contractors who are expected to be generous to city officials.

The city government seized the MSBF lot not to collect taxes but to award it to a private developer to turn it into still another mall. (Don’t we have a surfeit of malls already, which causes traffic jams in their vicinities?) Note that when the lot was allegedly “sold at public auction” it was the city government that got it. Note that the NHA, which is the owner of the property and, therefore, should be the one paying the real estate taxes, did not do anything to pay the taxes nor did it oppose the seizure by City Hall of its property. Because the NHA is in cahoots with City Hall.

Sometime ago, the NHA itself tried to seize the MSBF nurseries. It was to be transformed by a private developer into a shopping mall. But the foundation has an existing usufruct contract to the property and it was sustained by the court. So the plotters devised the real estate tax ploy to confiscate the property.

City Hall could not wait for the lease to expire. Ayala has already started construction on adjacent properties.

The courts used technicalities as excuses to rule against MSBF. They should have considered and given more weight to the evil motives behind the takeover.

The city government is obsessed with having a business center for Quezon City. Does it need one? There are already business centers nearby. There are the Ayala Center in Makati, the Ortigas Center in Pasig, the Araneta Center in Cubao, and the Global City in Taguig. There is no need for another one in Quezon City.

The QC administration is so obsessed with a business center that it also wants to take over the Ninoy Aquino Parks and Wildlife and the Veterans Memorial Medical Center and deny its citizens with their “green lungs.”

Ayala has already developed part of the University of the Philippines campus into the Ayala Technohub. It is currently developing the back of the UP campus into still another mall. The Senate is planning to construct its new Senate building also inside the UP campus when it already has one constructed beside the Batasang Pambansa. The campus serves the people as another green lung, something that is woefully lacking in the metropolis. The way the concrete jungle is taking over, the city is like a patient losing his lungs to COPD (chronic obstructive pulmonary disease), tuberculosis, emphysema and cancer.