Quezon City Mayor Herbert M. Bautista Cites Achievements Of His 8th Year In Office In His State Of The City Address Last Monday At City Hall

QUEZON CITY Mayor Herbert M. Bautista used to be Reneboy in “Flor de Luna” as a child star and, as a teenager, he was called Bistek in “Two Plus Two” with Maricel Soriano and that moniker somehow stuck with him. We recalled this as we watched him deliver his State of the City Address (SOCA) at the Quezon City Hall last Monday. It marks his 8th year as QC’s chief executive, during which time he made remarkable achievements that he cited during his speech.

One writer who’s with us quips that Mayor Bistek’s SOCA no-nonsense delivery is even better than Pres. Digong’s SONA, simply because he was direct to the point, no useless ramblings and adlibs that will lengthen his talk needlessly.

For the second consecutive year, QC is the named Most Competitive City in the country. The QC Disaster Risk Reduction & Management Council is also no. 1 among highly urbanized cities in the Gawad Kalasag Regional Awards. A Singapore-based organization also conferred the OpenGov Recognition of Excellence to QC through digital transformation. There are a lot more reasons for QC to celebrate as it garnered lots of other recognitions here and abroad.

For informal settlers, QC has put up 28 Bistekvillages housing projects benefitting 1,899 families. Herbert expects to put up about 50 more for about 5,000 families by the time his term ends. For child’s care, he has put up 294 public daycare centers managed by Social Services benefitting 23,420 children, and 18 Supervised Neighborhood Play Centers.

QC has built 3 new elementary and 11 new high school buildings with 221 classrooms, with a new building donated by ABS-CBN. The new QC Public Library is now considered one of the ten best libraries in the country and 19 branches all over the city. QC also has a Unified Referral System for children to protect them from abuse, exploitation and violence through Barangay Councils for the Protection of Children.

QC has many other achievements that justifies its title “The Philippine City of Asia”. Mayor Herbert has been very diligent in his efforts to make QC tackle the challenges of today’s local governments. His vision in pushing for innovations in E-governance, his pro-active disaster risk reduction management program, his global linkages and efforts to raise the standards for transparency and accountable governance have become his trademarks in public service. This is his last term as QC Mayor and we won’t be surprised if he’d run for senator in the next election. We have no doubt it’ll be easy for him to get a seat in the senate.