Baliuag, a first-class landlocked municipality in the coastal province of Bulacan north of Manila, is now officially a city.
In a plebiscite held Saturday, 17,814 or 75.8 percent of the total voters voted in favor of the cityhood of Baliuag while 5,702 or 24.2 percent voted No.
The voter turnout was low, with only 23,562 out of 10,8572 registered voters participating in the poll.
But Commission on Elections (Comelec) chairman George Garcia said this was a non-issue as the majority of the voters ratified the decision to convert Baliuag into a city.
The plebiscite was originally set for Jan. 14, 2023, but was rescheduled to an earlier date following the postponement of the December 2022 Barangay and Sangguniang Kabataan Elections to October 2023.
Baliuag Mayor Ferdinand Estrella said he expected the annual Internal Revenue Allotment for the city to double from P330 million to P660 million.
Estrella said he had been visiting the locality’s 27 barangays ahead of the plebiscite to convince voters to support the cityhood.
Once ratified, Baliuag will become Bulacan’s latest component city after Meycauayan, San Jose del Monte, and the provincial capital Malolos.
The city has a land area of 45.05 square kilometers which constitutes 1.62 percent of Bulacan’s total area. Its population as determined by the 2020 Census was 168,470.
This represented 4.54 percent of the total population of Bulacan province or 1.36 percent of the overall population of the Central Luzon region.
Based on these figures, the population density is computed at 3,740 inhabitants per square kilometer.