DAVAO CITY—The City Council here is ordering all electric utility companies and communications carriers to put their cables underground in Davao’s downtown area.
On Tuesday, the council approved the underground cabling ordinance in the Poblacion area, to be implemented over three years until 2020. Any company who violates it will be fined P5,000 or face a year of imprisonment.
Councilor Diosdado Mahipus, Council Committee on Energy chair, said since Davao is already a “world class city in the making,” it is about time to clear the city’s streets of hanging wires.
In late 2015, utility companies started putting underground cabling around the city hall area.
Mahipus said the councilors are looking forward to 2020, when the streets of Davao “will be clean from wires.”
“The different companies concerned personally volunteered to improve the quality of lives, environment and ambiance of the city of Davao, being the ‘Exhibit A’ of President Rodrigo Duterte,” he said.
Even though the utility companies volunteered to put their cables underground, the councilors still found the need to put it into law, to make other companies aware if they plan to put up wires.
Mahipus said the ordinance will have four phases. The first phase starts this year at the junction of San Pedro St. and Ramon Magsaysay Ave., covering about 1,100 meters.
“The underground cabling in the city hall area was our experimental stage,” he said.
In 2018, the second phase takes place from C.M Recto Street to Magsaysay Park. The third phase starts the following year from the Roxas Avenue Rotunda up to San Pedro Street, and the fourth phase unwraps in 2020 from San Pedro Street to the Bangko Sentral ng Pilipinas offices in Quirino district.