Updates on Zamboanga City’s Business Permits Administration

Two months ago I observed a roundtable discussion between Zamboanga City Mayor Celso Lobregat, City Government Department Heads, representatives from the Chamber of Commerce, and the United States Ambassador to the Philippines. The Mayor was presenting to the Ambassador a summary of the activities and benefits of a USAID – sponsored capacitation project. It was about improving the way Zamboanga City administers the Business Permit, and as I listened to his talk I was struck by the similarity of conditions faced by most cities in the issuance of this Permit. 

            The innovations mentioned by the good mayor were simple, sensible, and practical. Moreover, any city in the Philippines could do the same things that the Mayor talked about. They intensified the enforcement of regulatory requirements between February to December, so that businesses would have the required clearances by the time they applied for renewal of their Mayor’s Permits by January of the next year. They changed the sequence of activities in the process of renewing a Permit, so that applicants can pay the requisite taxes and fees even before they have complied with all requirements (thus ensuring collection of revenues).

                        Zamboanga City had three other innovations that may not be relevant or applicable to other cities. The first has to do with businesses located in buildings that have violated the Land Use Plan or the Building Code. The City only recently adopted its own Land Use and Zoning Ordinance, and is now enforcing it strictly. Here, city officials faced a dilemma: should they issue Business Permits to establishments located in buildings that violate either the Building Code or the Land Use ordinance? If they would, it might be construed as condoning the violation. But if they wouldn’t, a considerable number of legitimate businesses would not be able to get Permits, and the City would not be able to collect related taxes and fees from them. Mayor Lobregat resolved the problem by allowing owners of non-complying buildings to formally promise (in writing) to comply with the law. That way, local authorities had more teeth to enforce the Building Code and the Zoning Plan, and at the same time the Treasurer could collect Business Permit-related taxes and fees. 

            In a previous article I talked about how Zamboanga City faces a considerable squatter problem. The City used to deny applications for Mayor’s Permits filed by business owners operating on squatted land. The Mayor decided to change this policy by allowing them sign a waiver. The waiver says three important things: a) that the applicant recognizes that he/she does not own the land; b) that he/she promises to vacate the property when required; and c) the Permit does not give him/her any tenurial rights to the land. 

            The latest innovation introduced by the Zamboanga City officials and employees is the use of Geographic Information System (G I S)       to map the location of business establishments. The City’s Management Information System (MIS) Department provides the operations and the equipment, while the Planning and assessor’s offices provided background data, such as the street map and barangay boundaries. The City Treasurer’s staff provides data on the location of commercial buildings and business establishments found in those buildings. The information system is used to provide maps and lists of business establishments to all enforcement agencies (e.g., City Health Department, Bureau of Fire Protection) so that they can conduct their routine inspections efficiently.

End.

Getting There

We started this crazy project way back during Mayor Alvin Garcia’s time.  After getting disillusioned with a foreign-funded project managed out of Manila, I had come back to work part-time with the City Government.  I decided to focus on what is probably the most challenging area of local revenue generation: real property tax administration. 

 
Because a few years earlier I had helped to start the GIS Center, I gravitated towards the mission of developing a parcel fabric.  No, it’s not a kind of cloth.  “Parcel fabric” is a term given to a seamless digital map of all the lot parcels in the city.  It was a strategic choice, because such a map would not only allow us to manage the computation and collection of taxes for land properties, it would also serve as the foundation for other kinds of maps – a map of buildings (which are also taxed), a map of business within buildings (also taxable), a map of public facilities, maps of many other features and conditions.

 
Right from the get-go we knew this was going to be a long-term project.  First, we had to digitize (i.e., convert into a digital file) all our lot parcel maps.  This was done by putting the paper map on top of a “digitizing tablet”, which is a fancy name for a table that has electronic sensors on its surface.  The lines on the paper map are traced through the cross-hairs of a device called the “puck”; the sensors detect the location of the puck and signal the computer where to put the lines.  That way, line by line, intersection by intersection, we created electronic versions of our paper maps.  (Nowadays the preferred way of doing this is to scan the entire map, then use “raster-to-vector” software to convert the scanned image into lines and polygons.  Alternatively, the GIS operator can trace the scanned image onscreen to create the lines and polygons.  A fourth approach would have been to use coordinate geometry by entering bearing-and-distance data from Land Titles, and using the GIS software to create polygons.  Because we did not have copies of the titles for most of the land, this option was not available to us.  Also, the land survey for the mountain area of Cebu City has not been approved by the Land Management Bureau of the DENR, so there were no official government survey data for properties in that area).

 
Now the parcel files were organized in sections.  In the urban area of the city, roads defined the section boundaries; in rural areas, very few distinguishable features can be used to reference the section boundaries.  In the urban area, boundaries may follow the path of a river, bend at a distinctive rock formation or tree, or simply cut across open land.  We also knew that the section maps are not of the same scale, so GIS operators had to adjust the size of the digital versions of these section maps so that they would fit each other.  With the city streets as reference, this was comparatively easy to do for urban parcel maps.  It was much harder to do this with the rural lot parcel maps, and we had to “rubbersheet” the parcel files into the approximate locations only.

 
What we did not anticipate were problems like missing maps (to this day, Leizl Gonzaga and Cesar Concon are still looking for ways to get more maps from the Land Registration Authority), and the inability of our Tax Mapping Division to consistently reflect the subdivision and consolidation of properties in our paper maps.  The latter is no simple thing: we’re talking here about almost twenty (20) years of accumulation of subdivisions and consolidations that should have been done on parcel maps, but were not.  How could this have happened? Part of the reason is simply that when you work with paper maps of fixed size, subdivision a parcel the size of a postage stamp into ten or more parts is not easy.  With our GIS today, you can simply zoom in all you want and make as many subdivisions as required; back when they had to work with pen and paper, the same operation would have meant opening new section maps. 

 
Through all of these, Mary Jane Parker[1] Caballero led her GIS team into the heart of the Assessor’s Office.  One thing about MJ is her PR – she gets along better with people better than I do (ok, ok, most people get along better with others than I do, but she really knows how to get people to cooperate without having to twist their arms).  She also managed to wrap her head around an approach to getting the work done, and recruited a tenacious supervisor (Betty Boquecosa) who made sure everybody did their assigned work.

 
The parcel fabric was completed (sort of) during Mayor Garcia’s first term.  While all the parcel files had been digitized, and placed in their approximate location, the late Demboy Peralta had to transform many of those files to put them in the right size, shape, and orientation.  At that point, we were ready for the next challenge: tying up each parcel to its corresponding Tax Declaration record. 

 
You would expect each parcel to have one TD, and vice versa.  The results of our little experiment showed otherwise.  We found about 25,000 parcels apparently without TD; 22,000 parcels apparently with more than one TD; and 18,000 TDs apparently without corresponding parcels.  I use the word “apparently” because we were not certain about it – and the ensuing research showed that in many cases the detected “exceptions” were due to typographical error.  But I’m getting ahead of myself.

 
Seeing these figures, Mayor Garcia ordered the City Assessor and his staff to clean up their records.  By the end of his second term, they had achieved some progress.  But under Mayor Osmeña’s leadership their pace quickened.  About six months ago the District Tax Mappers even included clean-up targets in their Performance Targets.

 
It so happened that the MMTs under Leizl’s leadership decided to learn how to do Tax Mapping.  This involves three major phases: Pre-field, Field, and Post-field.  In the Pre-field Phase, records of land real properties are matched against section maps, to see whether there are parcels still without TD, or vice versa.  The result of Pre-Field would guide Field operations.  If for example we found parcels without TD during Pre-Field, the first thing we would do during Field operations is look for that parcel and appraise its value.

 
So we printed a list of the TDs for Sections 2 and 3 of Bgy Sto Niño.  Then we manually checked off the TDs against the parcel maps.  Wonder of wonders, they tied up.  For every TD, there is one parcel.  For every parcel, there is one TD. 

 
Wow, I thought, I would not have seen this kind of perfect match a few years ago.  It looks like we’re getting somewhere with Mary Jane’s and her team’s and the DTMs’ efforts.  Their work over the last few years is showing some real results in the quality of our real property records’ consistency and reliability.

 
So much remains to be done.  Nigel Zanoria wants to improve the accuracy of the placement of rural area section maps, so next month Harold Alcontin and the GPS team will go to the mountain barangays to get the coordinates of reference points like barangay boundary markers.  We noted that if you color-coded the parcels according to Base Unit Value assignment, we can find parcels along the same side of the street in different colors  - meaning they have different BUV values, which should not be the case if our General Revision Ordinance is strictly followed.  And the building footprints from our orthophoto do not line up with the parcel boundaries. 

 
But these things are for the coming days and weeks and months (hopefully, not years).  We’re not at the end of our journey yet, we’re just stopping over at Rivendell. For now, I am taking my sweet time reminiscing about the terrible problems we faced, the lifelong lessons we learned and the significant small victories we won.   For now it’s enough to know that, though a complete parcel fabric is still some way off, we’re getting there.

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[1] It happens that her husband is also named Peter