Ordinance 2024-114 redesignates 14,000 road depressions as Heritage Surface Variations, saves P3.2 billion in repair budget overnight

Bohiney Magazine | The London Prat

CITY OF MANILA — Manila Mayor Francisco Ilustre-Ramos declared victory in the city’s long-running campaign against road deterioration Wednesday after the City Council unanimously passed Ordinance 2024-114, which redesignates all road surface depressions deeper than five centimeters and wider than thirty centimeters as “Heritage Surface Variations” deserving of “aesthetic appreciation and civic pride,” effectively reclassifying the city’s estimated 14,000 potholes out of existence and saving P3.2 billion in deferred repair costs the city did not have anyway.

The Ordinance

Ordinance 2024-114, titled “An Ordinance Recognizing the Cultural and Historical Significance of Manila’s Organic Road Topography and Providing for Its Dignified Acknowledgment,” passed on a twelve-zero vote after forty minutes of debate during which three council members praised the mayor’s “creative governance approach” and two others asked questions that were answered by the council president before the questioners finished asking them.

Under the ordinance, road surface depressions that previously required repair under the Public Works Code’s road maintenance standards are now classified as “topographic character elements” that reflect “the accumulated history of Manila’s street surfaces.” The Department of Public Services will install small orange marker cones alongside the largest Heritage Surface Variations, a measure city officials said would improve road safety while also drawing attention to the city’s unique infrastructural heritage.

“Manila’s roads tell a story,” Mayor Ilustre-Ramos said at the signing ceremony, held in front of a road on Taft Avenue containing what the mayor’s communications team had, for purposes of the event, designated Heritage Surface Variation No. 1. “They tell the story of decades of heavy rainfall, heavy traffic, and heavy governance. That story deserves to be honored, not paved over.”

Engineers Respond With Technical Objections

The Urban Road Engineering Society of the Philippines issued a statement saying that reclassifying road surface depressions as heritage features did not alter their structural properties, load-bearing implications, or tendency to damage vehicle suspensions and cause accidents, and that the society “respectfully but firmly” noted that the city’s road maintenance obligations under existing law could not be discharged through linguistic redesignation.

The city’s legal office responded that the ordinance did not eliminate road maintenance obligations but “reframed the maintenance conversation within an appreciative rather than deficit framework,” and that future road maintenance work on Heritage Surface Variations would be described as “heritage stewardship” rather than “repair,” a distinction the engineering society called “a difference without consequence” and the city called “a significant philosophical reorientation.”

The Manila Bulletin reported that a heritage marker installation contractor had already been retained at a cost of P8.4 million, meaning the ordinance had so far cost the city P8.4 million more than it saved, a calculation the mayor’s office said was “an overly narrow accounting of value that fails to capture the heritage dividend.”

Public and Media Reaction

Reactions from Manila residents ranged from confused to resigned to one motorist on Espana Boulevard who, upon learning that the pothole that had punctured his tire the previous Tuesday was now a Heritage Surface Variation, said he would like to submit an invoice for his cultural appreciation experience.

The Manila city tourism office has begun incorporating Heritage Surface Variations into its promotional materials, noting that the reclassification gives Manila “one of Asia’s largest concentrations of designated road heritage sites” and that this represented “a significant competitive advantage in the cultural tourism sector,” a market segment that, as far as any analyst can determine, does not presently exist.

The National Angle

The ordinance has attracted national attention partly because three other cities in Metro Manila have expressed interest in adopting similar frameworks, a development the DPWH said it was “monitoring with interest” and which the Department of Interior and Local Government said was “within the discretion of local governments to explore,” neither of which constituted the clear discouragement that road engineers and vehicle owners were hoping to hear.

National transport group PISTON noted that the combined impact of reclassifying all Metro Manila potholes as heritage features would relieve municipal governments of an estimated P47 billion in deferred road maintenance liability, reduce the national government’s pressure to fund infrastructure catch-up spending, and leave Metro Manila’s seventeen million daily commuters navigating roads that were the same physical condition as before but now carried official documentation of their significance.

Mayor Ilustre-Ramos said he hoped other cities would follow Manila’s lead and that he was available to consult on implementation. He was standing, at the time of this interview, beside Heritage Surface Variation No. 1. It had rained the previous night. It was full of water. A pigeon was bathing in it. The mayor said this was exactly the kind of urban wildlife interaction that made Manila special.

The Metro Manila Council, which oversees inter-city road coordination across the seventeen cities and municipalities of the metropolis, was briefed on Manila’s Heritage Surface Variation ordinance at its monthly meeting and responded with what one attendee described as “a silence that had its own weather system.” Three city mayors subsequently contacted Manila’s legal office requesting copies of the ordinance, which city officials took as interest in adoption and which two of the three mayors’ offices later clarified was interest in “understanding what we are dealing with legally” rather than interest in replication. The third mayor’s office has not clarified. The Manila tourism office has drafted a heritage surface variation walking tour itinerary pending review. It covers fourteen kilometers of road and is estimated to take four hours on foot or, by car, considerably longer.

Celebrating Manila’s heritage at The London Prat and Bohiney Magazine.

Also going nowhere fast at The Onion | The Shovel | NewsThump

SOURCE: https://bohiney.com/manila-mayor-reclassifies-potholes-heritage-surface-variations/