AKBAYAN Rep. Barry Gutierrez on Monday slammed Senator Francisco Escudero for allegedly “credit-grabbing” from Camarines Sur. Rep. Leni Robredo, the administration’s candidate for vice president in this year’s elections.
Gutierrez, the spokesman of Manuel Roxas II, the administration’s candidate for president, said Escudero was grabbing credit for a bill pushing for an “on-site, in-city” housing for squatters to allegedly advance his candidacy.
But a check on the website of the House of Representatives showed that Robredo wasn’t even a co-author of the House bill passed in Congress as Gutierrez claims.
“If he’s serious with that, why didn’t he pass the “on-site, in-city bill” during his Senate tenure?” Gutierrez said in a statement to reporters.
“It seems that Chiz [Escudero] is clueless. Even before May 2015, Cong. Leni [had] passed that in the House.
“Is that what you’ll be doing always, taking credit for the work of others?”
Escudero, who is running as Senator Grace Poe’s vice president, said Sunday he would push for such a program in order to provide squatters decent housing they needed without having to relocate them in areas without jobs and livelihood opportunities.
“Through on-site resettlement, you will be able to upgrade and rehabilitate blighted slum urban areas and at the same time minimize [the] displacement of dwellers in said areas where they have enough access to basic social services and livelihood,” Escudero said in a statement.
The House passed in May 2015 House Bill 5144, or the proposed “On-site, In-City, Near-City Resettlement Act” that aims to upgrade squatter settlements “with enhanced physical living conditions and improved quality of life” and to “fully [integrate them] into a city’s or an urban area’s physical and socioeconomic fabric and urban governance system.”
Sought for clarification, Gutierrez said that, being the principal sponsor of the measure, he could “vouch 100 percent that Robredo was a co-author of the bill.”
“Rep. Robredo pushed for that bill, that being an initiative pushed by her late husband Jesse Robredo when he was still Interior Secretary,” he said in a phone interview.
