By RALPH JOHN MIJARES
ROXAS City — With ambulant vendors around, enterprisers renting stalls at the Roxas City Integrated Transport Terminal at Pueblo de Panay here are at a disadvantage, a city government consultant said.
Carmen Andrade, consultant for economic affairs, has issued a memorandum addressed to Mayor Angel Alan Celino recommending the denial of the request of 43 vendors to be allowed to sell at the terminal premises.
The vendors claimed to be members of the Pueblo de Panay Vendors Association.
Andrade considered the ambulant vendors around the terminal as “nuisance.”
Citing a feasibility study, Andrade said the rent that the stallholders were paying will be used to defray the city government’s P51-million loan with the United Coconut Planters Bank for the construction of the terminal.
Ambulant vendors selling within the vicinity of the terminal “pose unfair competition to the stallholders,” she said in the memo.
The terminal, which opened on June 15, is an economic enterprise of the city government.
“It is our responsibility to protect our lessees so that they will be able to pay us their monthly lease,” Andrade said. “In turn, [the city could] pay [its] amortization in the bank.”
Pueblo de Panay, a 400-hectare mixed-use, master-planned township, has responsibility over the ambulant vendors, she said.
“Pueblo de Panay owns them (the vendors), so it is just right that it adopts them,” the city government consultant said.
Andrade described the ambulant vendors as “squatters” and a “nuisance” to the terminal’s operation.
She also said they were “a security risk and will make maintaining peace and order difficult,” citing cases in other parts of the country where vendors — or people pretending to be vendors — bring drugs and explosives.
“Humingi po kami ng pahintulot na maka tinda kami sa loob ng bagong terminal bilang ambulant vendors dahil dito lang nakasalalay ang aming hanapbuhay gaya ng pagkain, allowance at pampaaral sa mga anak namin, pambili ng gamot, at iba pa [sic],” the vendors said in a letter to Celino dated June 18, 2014.
“Paano mayor ’pag sa labas lang wala naman my bumibili,” the vendors asked. They also said, “Handa kaming sundin ang pamamalakad sa loob ng terminal.”
Andrade claimed that these vendors plied their trade in different terminals here before a temporary terminal — now the fully operational Roxas City Integrated Transport Terminal — was put up at Pueblo de Panay last year.
A representative of Pueblo de Panay who requested anonymity told Panay News that the township management refuses to comment for the meantime./PN
