Editorial

If you’re discerning enough, you can’t miss the contrast in the approach to the holding of grand extravaganzas for the longest grill world record quest of Dagupan City and Alcala town here in Pangasinan.

While one, Dagupan, makes such a fuss about the event being tourism-driven festival, the other, Alcala, makes no bones about describing its project as a “fund-raising activity” involving its moneyed overseas native sons and daughters who have all but bought the 1,000 grills (and in dollars, that) the town prepared for the mass barbecue party.

Dagupan’s now traditional Bangus Festival featuring a lot of street grilling and merry-making never makes mention of raising any such money from the event, not before, not now, not ever, which, in all respects, therefore makes it nothing more than a spending binge to satisfy the bacchanalian urge of officials and citizens alike. Let’s face it, if tourism is at all served, it becomes only peripheral to the greater concern for ego-tripping among many Dagupenos, not the least of them those at the City Hall.

In simple contrast, the Alcalenians, going by their avowed intentions noted in news reports and interviews with Mayor Manuel Collado, want their event to work for them, finance-wise, not them working for it, as is sadly evident in Daguipan’s Bangusfest. It might even be that Alcala would be able to show how to properly account for the income earned from the whole exercise while Dagupan, thru its four or five years of staging the summer street show, especially in the past two years, has failed to submit for public scrutiny the money derived from the big-time advertisers, if any, this, to dispel a growing notion among cityfolk that something’s rotten, and it’s not in Denmark.

And with the Wowowee tragedy in hindsight, we hope this year’s event would have workable crowd control plans besides. We can even probably take Bangus Festival as a losing (spending) proposition each time but probably not if it becomes a tragedy of the highest proportions.