ANGELES CITY- This city’s Mayor Edgardo Pamintuan has been named one of the top 10 city mayors of the world for 2012 by the London-based City Mayors Foundation (CMF), dubbed as an “international think tank dedicated to local government.”
Pamintuan ranked eighth in a list topped by Mayor Inaki Azcuna of Bilbao, Spain.
The CMF conveyed yesterday to Pamintuan his being named in the top 10 for World Mayors Prize for 2012.
The World Mayor Prize is given every two years to mayors with “outstanding contributions to his or her community and has developed a vision for urban living and working that is relevant to towns and cities across the world,” the CMF website said.
The CMF, established in London in 2003, “consists of professionals working together to promote strong and prosperous cities as well as good local government.”
Its website said the CMF “has no association with any city or organisation and is run on strictly non-commercial, non-profit lines.”
The CMF named the winners in the top 10 World Mayors for 2012 as Azcuna of Bilbao, Spain; Lisa Scaffidi of Perth, Australia; Joko Widodo of Surakarta, Indonesia; Régis Labeaume of Québec City, Canada; John F Cook of El Paso, Texas in the US; Park Wan-su of Changwon City, South Korea; Len Brown of Auckland, New Zealand; Pamintuan; Mouhib Khatir of Zeralda, Algeria, and; Alfonso Sánchez Garza of Matamoros, Mexico.
There were initially 88 city mayors from around the world who were nominated for the World Mayors 2012, including Manila Mayor Alfredo Lim and Davao City Mayor Sarah Duterte. Last June, the list was trimmed down to 25.
“The nomination was done by accomplishing an online nomination form, in which a person has to state the reasons for nominating the city official of his or her choice,” CMF said.
Pamintuan has been noted for his Medikalinga Clinic which gives free minor surgeries for indigents and renal center at the Ospital ning Angeles which boasts of more dialysis machines than any of the bigger hospitals in Metro Manila. The renal center also gives huge discounts to poor patients.
There have been a few other Filipino mayors who had made it to the top 10 World Mayors in the past, including City of San Fernando Mayor Oscar Rodriguez in 2005, Makati City Mayor Jejomar Binay in 2006 and Marikina City Mayor Marides Fernando in 2008.
In 2010, the late Interior and Local Governments Sec. Jesse Robredo, who was then Mayor of Naga City, was a finalist.
The top in the list of World Mayors had included mayors from Tirana in Albania in 2004, Athens, Greece in 2005, Melbourne, Australia in 2006, Cape Town in South Africa in 2008 and Mexico City in Mexico in 2010.
The website said the World Mayors award honors “mayors with the vision, passion and skills to make their cities incredible places to live in, work in and visit, and aims to “show what outstanding mayors can achieve.”
No announcement for the formal awarding event has yet been made.
