Former Vice President Jejomar Binay said Thursday his daughter, incumbent Makati City Mayor Abigail Binay, deserved to be reelected in the May 2019 midterm polls because she performed well and had shown genuine compassion for her constituents compared to her predecessor.
Binay said public services and government operations were ignored and declined during the time of Mayor Romulo Peña Jr. and these included significant benefits for residents he initiated during his term as Makati mayor.
“She showed very good performance. She deserves to be reelected,” Binay told a forum in Manila.
Binay, now running for a House seat to represent Makati’s 1st district, served as city chief executive from 1986 to 1998 and from 2001 to 2010 before he was elected vice president in 2010.
Abigail is the official candidate for mayor of the United Nationalist Alliance chaired by her father. She is running against her brother, also former Mayor Jejomar Erwin “Junjun” Binay.
Binay said the city under the leadership of his daughter regained its fiscal strength, with 90 percent of the 2018 target—or P14.17 billion—already met in August.
Some 3,378 new business establishments in Makati were recorded by the Business Permit and Licensing Office from January to Sept.10 this year.
The city government noted a significant increase in the number of permit renewals with 33,729 posted as of Sept. 10, which topped by more than 900 last year’s total of 32,790 renewals.
This shows that Makati remains the location of choice for local and foreign businesses.
With more revenues, Mayor Abby said her administration could continue expanding and adding new benefits for residents, particularly in health, education and social welfare.
Just last week, the Commission on Audit declared Makati as the country’s richest city, with total assets reaching P196.5 billion.
It is also the first and only local government to exceed the P100-billion mark.
For more than five years, Makati was outranked by Quezon City as the richest locality.
Since Mayor Abby took office in July 2016, the city government has implemented reforms at City Hall to facilitate business registration and promote transparency, including an aggressive campaign against fixers.
She also ordered the strict monitoring of businesses for compliance with relevant laws, in line with her thrust to restore discipline and respect for the law in the city.
Under her leadership, Makati earned the first-ever ‘unqualified audit opinion’ of the Commission on Audit in the latter’s audit report for calendar year 2017.
This means that the financial statements of the city government conform with Generally Accepted Accounting Principles and that they fairly represent the city’s financial accounts.
It was also in 2017 that the city posted, for the first time in 12 years, a two-digit increase in revenue collections.
Makati City also met the performance target set by the Bureau of Local Government Finance under the Department of Finance in 2017.
Makati achieved 100 percent of the BLGF’s total locally-sourced income target for 2017 amounting to P14.25 billion, after its actual collections from local sources reached P14.26 billion in November of 2017.
Under the administration of Mayor Abby, Makati has registered its highest revenue collection in years without increasing taxes.
From July to December 2016, her first six months in office, the city government had topped by over P600 million the revenue collection for the same period in 2015 under the previous administration.