The Pangasinan Star ONLINE

Behn Fer. Hortaleza, Jr.

AS IN past years, Pogo Grande and Pogo-Lasip were where firecracker explosion freaks of all ages and stature flocked to again yesterday, December 31. Our barangay, the popular source of high-powered pyrotechnics thru the decades, rivaled only by Bacayao Sur, has maintained its pre-eminence as the place to find your kind of blast in, from pint-sized triangles to huge rockets, Super Lolos and Judas Belts. Eve of the New Year always finds that road intersection after the elementary school looking like a flea market for the firecrackers. Buyers arrive on tricycles, bicycles, tri-bikes vans, jeepneys, utility vehicles all seeking the ultimate in gunpowder boom.

Indeed, whatever the police and fire departments say and warn about, there is no stopping that trade just before the New Year. Entire households make it their cottage industry, making like some neighborhood bomb-makers preparing for the onslaught of the enemy just as soon as October begins winding up till a week before year’s end.

On January 1, day after the revelries to welcome New Year, at 12 high noon, the road to Pogo and Lasip becomes No Man’s Land (that is, traffic is held at bay in the area fronting the elementary school) as the residents, in full reverence for tradition, string up and string out the unsold or leftover firecrackers from the previous night’s merrymaking. At the strike of 12 noon, the deadly, snaking belt is light to start a non-stop round of explosions that reverberate almost throughout the city. Nothing thrills the Pogo-Lasip bomb-makers more than this yearly display of gunpowder mayhem; something tells us they get their orgasm that way.

After making oodles of money from the frenzied pre-new year buying and selling of the ‘crackers on Pogo road, most of them get their final “kicks” in lighting their own capital “investments” and seeing and hearing it explode in a deafening crackle and roar, sending out the troubles and problems of the old year with their own sonic booms.
Happy New Year, Folks!

* * * * *

“CAN it be that it was all so simple then/ Or has time rewritten every line?

So goes a line in a song that just popped up in our mind while thinking of how very simple our relative, Councilor Michael F appears to have made his changing of fees and charges for various services and undertakings as contained in the city’s old revenue code. Why, the majority floorleader and chairman, committee on finance of the city council, even managed to have the “updated” revenue code passed in session last December 13 with nary a hitch.

No doubt, alderman Michael and his colleagues in the sanggunian were guided by the noblest of intentions to find a quick solution to a looming financial disaster for the Dagupan coffers, mainly brought about by a huge shortfall in revenues at the close of the year to the whooping tune of some P20 million.

But whatever happened to good, old public hearings or consultations where taxation is concerned? We scrapped the controversial pay parking measure passed by the same sanggunian for lack of due public consultations – only to fall guilty of the same oversight in yet another area of revenue-generation?

Horse before the cart, gentlemen. It’s still the best -- and only way –to impose taxes and fees in the civilized world. That is, unless they’ve already revised the Local Government Code too while no one was looking.

Happy New year, folks!