ANGELES CITY – “Call of duty. Magalang town has no direction and future with the sitting mayor.”
Thus said former mayor Lyndon Cunanan when asked about his decision to run for mayor of Magalang, Pampanga in 2013. He will run in tandem with former Vice Mayor Norman Lacson.
Cunanan and Lacson both lost to Mayor Romy Pecson in the 2010 elections.
“If only I or Lacson gave up then, one of us could have won against Pecson,” said Cunanan in a chance interview at the Marquee Mall here.
“But that’s water under the bridge now. I and Lacson have joined forces with other disgruntled residents to beat Mayor Pecson this time,” he added.
Cunanan said that while Magalang had been consistently adjudged as cleanest among Pampanga towns by the Department of Interior and Local Government (DILG) when he and former Mayor Pastor Guiao were at helm, the town today “is good only at fourth place” as the recent event at Oxford Hotel showed.
Cunanan was elected and declared mayor in 2010 but his two-year legal battle against Pecson ended with him being asked by the Supreme Court to vacate his post in May 2009.
Cunanan alleged that Pecson “illegally increased the number of job order (JOs) workers numbering to about 700 now.”
He added that under the provisions set by the Local Government Code, the first class municipality of Magalang with some P100-million annual budget should have “only about 300 JOs at the maximum.”
Cunanan said that when he was mayor with almost the same budget he had between 200 to 300 JOs.
Cunanan said the peace and order situation in Magalang had been at its worst and highlighted by the recent murder of four male persons who were based in nearby Angeles City.
For his part, Lacson said personal political interests must be set aside to make sure that the “common enemy” will be defeated in next year’s election. He added that he gave up his ambition to be mayor “for the sake of winning against Pecson at all cost.”
Lacson said he and Cunanan will join the ticket of Vice Gov. Joseller “Yeng” Guiao, who earlier declared his first district congressional bid.
Pecson will reportedly run in tandem with Vice Mayor Renato Bartolome.
Punto tried at least four times since last week to get the reactions of Pecson and Bartolome but they failed to return calls and SMS txt messages.
