Bangui-Dumalneg territorial rift escalates

By Alfredo C. Garvida, Jr.

Contributor

What initially appeared as a simple territorial dispute between the municipalities of Bangui and Dumalneg about a decade ago involving Barangay San Isidro has now escalated into a fierce exchange of rhetoric and court actions between the two towns, notwithstanding that The Supreme Court has already rendered a final-and-executory decision favoring Dumalneg’s cause.

In the aftermath of this SC decision, a Writ of Execution, dated June 25, 2013, was issued by the RTC Branch in Bangui mandating Dumalneg to take possession of Barangay San Isidro, the erstwhile northeastern most barangay of the Municipality of Bangui.

This court decision, having already been recorded in the Entry of Judgment, appeared to have culminated a long-drawn, hard-fought legal battle involving the two neighboring municipalities on the issue of jurisdiction over Barangay San Isidro—which started on July 28, 2003 when the Sangguniang Panlalawigan of Ilocos Norte, empowered by law to act as a quasi-judicial body to adjudicate territorial disputes involving municipalities, adjudged that Barangay San Isidro belonged to the Municipality of Dumalneg.

The final-and-executory SC decision was just an end that ushered in a new beginning, however, as the second phase of the two municipalities’ legal battles has merely commenced:

In consequence of the RTC Writ of Execution, Bangui promptly filed a Motion for Reconsideration, citing the court’s lack of jurisdiction to issue the writ being not the Court of Origin but the Sangguniang Panlalawigan of Ilocos Norte—which the court promptly denied;

Bangui elevated its case to the Court of Appeals via a Petition for Certiorari alleging the RTC’s “lack of jurisdiction amounting to abuse of discretion,” with a prayer for a Temporary Restraining Order;

Meanwhile, the Municipal Assessor of Bangui, Ms. Nelfa Bulosan, was directed by the Provincial Assessor in a July 25, 2013 office memorandum to turn over all records pertaining to Barangay San Isidro to the Municipality of Dumalneg. This was followed by a letter-request from Dumalneg Mayor Lairvee Garvida-Espiritu to Ms. Bulosan, who refused to heed, citing an Office Memorandum of Dr. Diosdado I. Garvida, Lairvee’s cousin and Bangui’s new mayor, instructing her to “defer the TRANSFER OF RECORDS of Barangay San Isidro, pending the decision of the Court of Appeals on our motion” (for certiorari);

Dumalneg, according to a reliable source, contemplates to file a Mandamus petition against Ms. Bulosan, which as of this writing the Bangui RTC has yet to receive;

Bangui, in return, has upped the ante, as its lawyers are readying a case against Dumalneg’s legitimacy as a regular municipality citing the latter’s lacking in documentary evidence evincing its previous existence as a municipal district, an indispensable requisite to its becoming a regular municipality. This was made evident by Mayor Garvida’s September 18 letter to Mayor Lairvee reiterating Bangui’s position to “defer” transferring San Isidro’s records to Dumalneg, citing among other things that he “cannot find any legislative act, proclamation or law that declares Dumalneg as a municipal district of Bangui before its creation as a regular municipality.”

Mayor Garvida’s move to question in court Dumalneg’s legitimacy as a regular municipality, per independent observers, merely amounts to being a dilatory tactic to prolong San Isidro’s transfer to Dumalneg. The neophyte mayor’s assertion, however, could hold water in court if indeed there was no law or presidential proclamation giving Dumalneg—an erstwhile barrio (now called barangay) of Bangui where cultural minorities settled some decades ago—the status of a municipal district as a pre-qualification to its becoming a regular municipality.

Unrelated to the point of relevancy under legal  norms relevant to the issue of “municipal district,” but germane nonetheless to the issue of whether San Isidro was indeed a part of Dumalneg, geographically and sociologically, before—just for argument’s sake—it became a municipal district, as Mayor Garvida has keenly observed ,are the questions of why San Isidro was not included as part of the settlement place for the cultural minorities at the time they were supposed to be settled in a “municipal district,” and why there are no noticeable number of cultural minorities residing now, and even then, in Barangay San Isidro. Mayor Garvida further observes that when Dumalneg was accorded the status of a regular municipality, San Isidro’s inclusion as its part was never considered.

The town of Bangui, per historical data, used to be the largest town in Ilocos Norte which originally encompassed six (6) existing municipalities now, namely, Santa Praxedes (Cagayan), Pagudpud, Adams, Dumalneg, Bangui and Burgos. Mayor Garvida finds irony in the fact that Bangui gave a barrio for the  cultural minorities to settle, until this barrio, which is Dumalneg, became a regular municipality, under “dubious circumstances,” if we follow Mayor Garvida’s rhetoric, and now this erstwhile barrio is annexing another Bangui barrio, which is San Isidro, as its own.

These scenarios tend to substantiate Oliver Wendell Holmes’ notion that “lust of power is the most flagrant of all passions.” Nevertheless, whatever the final outcome will become, the residents of both municipalities are hoping that there will be no love lost between these two mayors; after all, they are relatives and they are friends as well.