ANGELES CITY – “No offense to apl.de.app. but it’s not him, even granting his global fame, that shall attract potential investments to the Clark Green City.”
Thus said the advocacy group Pinoy Gumising Ka Movement in reaction to the engagement of the Angeles City-born member of the Grammy Award-winning Black Eyed Peas with the Bases Conversion Development Authority in its Clark Green City project.
Last Thursday, the singer’s Singapore- based Apl Tree Group Pte. Ltd. signed a memorandum of understanding with the BCDA “to promote and market worldwide key areas of investment and development… including but not limited to the Clark Freeport Zone and the Clark Green City.”
“We need innovators and creative Filipinos to promote the Green City,” said BCDA President- CEO Arnel Paciano Casanova during the signing. “apl.de.ap and other artists will be used to attract investors based in other countries to invest at Clark and its Green City.”
In response to Casanova, the singer who was born Allan Pineda Lindo, Jr here said: “I am excited to help promote the Green City to help my fellow Kapampangans and other Filipinos.”
Short sighted
“We commend apl. de.ap for his desire to help, even as we lament Casanova’s short sightedness,” said PGKM Chairman Ruperto L. Cruz. “The Clark Green City project may generate publicity with apl. de.ap as its poster boy, but what will attract investments will be infrastructures in-place that shall ascertain its viability,” Cruz qualified.
To Cruz, the “full operation” of the Clark International Airport as international gateway “is prime essential to the very being” of the Clark Green City. “No foreign investor in his right mind will sink in millions of dollars in a place accessible only through the congested NAIA (Ninoy Aquino International Airport) and traffic-gridlocked Metro Manila.
Simple as that,” Cruz said. A “necessary complement” to the Clark airport is a rail system between the metropolis and Clark “for ease and facility of travel,” according to Cruz. This will also help in decongesting Metro Manila, “given the dire realities of the MRT (Metro Rail Transit) and the LRT (Light Rail Transit) and Last Friday’s paralysis of the metropolis that extended up to the North Luzon Expressway (NLEx).”
MVP
While it was reported only last week that President Aquino has asked the Department of Transportation and Communications (DOTC) to conduct a feasibility study on a “high speed railway” to link Clark and Metro Manila, the feasibility of a high-speed rail system had long been proposed by business magnate Manny V. Pangilinan to run parallel with the NLEx which is run by one of his companies.
“The DOTC may just take it to MVP, if it wants to speed up matters,” Cruz noted. In a number of media interviews, Pangilinan has said all he was waiting for “is a clear policy statement from the President on government plans for Clark.”
Scheme
“It will not happen. Not without a fully operational Clark airport and rail system,” the PGKM said of Casanova’s scheme to adopt the Global City-Fort Bonifacio template in the development of the Clark Green City. “Fort Bonifacio is premium land, at the very nexus of the metropolis. It had all – infrastructure in-place, easy access, peripheral services – that the Clark sub-zone does not,” Cruz said.
Cruz likewise belittled Casanova’s statement that: “We will provide the basics to make the site accessible to investors who then would do the rest. I expect the private sector to spend about P59 billion to put up needed infrastructure in the rest of the Clark Green City.”
“Within the time frame of less than two years remaining in the Aquino presidency and Casanova’s co-terminus status, that would be the greatest miracle that can happen on the face of the earth,” Cruz said.
