BIZ-COLUMN: OPINION- Subic freeport: the new Chinatown By Dr. Dante A. Ang

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Now, don’t get me wrong. I am half Chinese. My late father and grandfather immigrated to the Philippines from Amoy, China. I love Chinatown and the authentic Chinese food and delicacies it offers. I used to go to Binondo in my younger years to visit my maternal grandfather, who used to work for The Manila Times on Soler Street.

But when I say Subic is the new Chinatown, I mean things have turned for the worse in the Subic Bay Freeport (SBF).

Going to Subic is no longer fun. It has lost its luster, its zest. It has lost its soul. It has become a hodgepodge of a place that reflects decades of neglect. No central planning is discernible. Zoning is a mess. There is no order. Foreign workers wander around. When it rains, some areas get flooded. Traffic builds up during rush hours. Welcome to the new Chinatown.

Foreign workers, mostly Chinese, have taken up residence inside the Subic Bay Metropolitan Authority (SBMA) loitering around the district in their slippers and shorts, puffing cigarettes and creating billows of smoke endlessly like a chimney. They litter the place with their cigarette butts. They are unkempt and boisterous, making a nuisance of themselves around visiting tourists or those who happen to be passing by.

They have also caused a shortage of hotel rooms in the area. For tourists, booking a room at a decent hotel in the district during weekends is chancy.

A lack of plan, foresight
On one hand, it is good that the SBMA has successfully positioned itself as a prime tourist destination, as well as an investment hub. Unlike Clark, Subic offers a variety of attractions, such as yachting, snorkeling, fishing, swimming, jungle survival lessons, horseback riding and a host of other fun-filled family activities.

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On the other hand SBMA has utterly failed to anticipate and prepare for the influx of visitors and foreign workers drawn in by this business phenomenon called online gaming. As a result, hotels there now look like dormitories, converted to accommodate the wave of Chinese techies who have set up their abode in the hotel, hanging their personal, private laundry to dry on clotheslines by the hotel window for all to see.

Hotels are for tourists or transients, and are not built as residential condominiums.

Clearly, there is a failure of regulation past and present. To be fair, this odious and anomalous situation, which should have been handled as a management problem with foresight and planning, was only inherited by the present SBMA Board. Yet the present Board cannot escape the responsibility of putting things in order. It has to act with dispatch and do something before the wave of discontent among foreign and local tourists, not to mention the present and prospective business locators in the zone, gets worse to negate the gains of the SBMA.

Since the Americans left the US base in Subic in 1992, no major infrastructure development or maintenance has been undertaken in the freeport. The previous SBMA board failed miserably to map out a plan for the future. It failed to adopt an efficient land use for the hotel site so that online gaming establishments would have found better residences than hotels temporarily converted into a boarding house for the Chinese employees. SBMA’s present land use plan is still the same as that used by the Americans decades ago; nothing has changed. It is now sowing the seeds of neglect and lack of foresight.

The freeport mandate
It now falls on the lap of the present SBMA Board to untangle the knotty situation. The question is: Is the Board, led by Chairman Wilma Eisma, up to the challenge? Does it have the political will to do what is right? Better yet, does the Eisma-led board have a plan and a vision for the future?

It might be instructive for the present SBMA board to revisit the mandate of the freeport when it was established in 1992. Its primary aim was, and still is, to serve as an investment and tourist destination. It also aims to help create jobs and, at the same time, assist in the socioeconomic development of the towns and cities that surround it.

To the credit of the previous and present Board, the number of workers inside SBMA has leaped from 30,000 during the American occupation of Subic to more than 130,000, and is still growing. Where they failed miserably was in the planning for the future and regulating the conduct of businesses in the freeport, more particularly the online gaming.

Palliative at best
The moratorium on online gaming imposed by the present Board is hardly the solution. It is palliative at best.

I have nothing against online gaming. Online gaming brings foreign workers and creates jobs for Filipinos. Foreign nationals, in turn, animate business and bring in revenues to restaurants and shopping centers, among other businesses that benefit from their patronage. The SBMA should embrace these present business realities; may be even able to help Filipinos learn Mandarin so that they could be employed in the online gaming industry.

Maybe it should make representations, or enter into partnerships with existing educational institutions in SBMA, for the teaching of Mandarin to the countless jobless Filipinos. This can be funded by the SBMA through a scholarship arrangement with existing schools. Either that or the online gaming companies can be convinced to fund the scholars. Or both.

At the same time, the SBMA should secure a commitment from the online gaming companies operating in SBMA to set aside a number of seats for the locals immediately after graduating from their Mandarin class.

The long-term solution to the SBMA woes is to revisit the decades-old land use and come up with a more practical and efficient plan. It should consider the Las Vegas model, where all casinos, gaming and clubs are situated on a strip.

That would mean rethinking the present zoning and coming up with a plan consistent with the present business realities of Subic, with the ultimate goal of bringing back the luster of SBMA as a primary investment, tourist and job creation center.

Will the Eisma-led board seize the moment? We shall soon see.

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