Changes in Baguio’s night market

BAGUIO CITY, Philippines—Rock music has been blasting nightly out of Burnham Park’s Athletic Bowl, where officials have relocated most of the city’s street vendors.

Food carts selling an assortment of items have disappeared from Harrison Road and the back alleys of Session Road, after their owners were persuaded by city officials to ply their trade at the park.

Every 7 p.m., ukay-ukay (used clothes) vendors used to line up the side streets behind the Baguio Patriotic School and the street fronting Burnham Park’s Melvin Jones grandstand.

They’re also gone now-–transferred to the Athletic Bowl, which the city council decided to convert into the city’s first organized night market for tourists until May 30.

City officials spruced up the idle sports facility, installed lights around the track oval, and marked down stalls good for 400 peddlers.

Since April 18, rock bands have been performing for the night market. Sponsored for the Holy Week by a food and beverage company, the night market on Easter Sunday featured Dagupan City-based band, “Sensitive Theory,” and homegrown bands “Powerpuff Corn” and the “Edralins.”

It wasn’t the first time Baguio had conceived of a street bazaar that equals the scale and drawing power of Hong Kong’s Temple Street night market or England’s Portobello Road.

The city government had tolerated nightly street displays of used clothes and other items, most of them imported from Hong Kong, when it first became a fad in the last few years.

Baguio also found success in the annual Baguio Flower Festival’s Session Road in Bloom-–which converts the road into a week-long street bazaar filled with assorted merchandise and dining areas.

But this was the first time the city government sought the services of the Department of Tourism to sell the idea to consumers.

The night market was launched at a press conference last week by Purificacion Molintas, DOT Cordillera director, and by lawyer Carlos Canilao, city administrator.

Molintas says the project rides on the same market enthusiasm tourists have for Baguio’s ukay-ukay.

“They still come up to shop for ukay. We have celebrities who shop for items they later use for their shows,” she says.

From the city government standpoint, however, the project addresses Baguio’s tussle with illegal peddlers, Canilao says.

The city’s Public Order and Safety Division (PSOD) has been mounting clearing operations along the city’s streets to rid these of illegal vendors.

Since 2008, the city government has been pressured to improve a tax ordinance that describes as legitimate all forms of peddling, regardless of whether these enterprises are licensed.

This was stressed in a Jan. 17, 2008 resolution of the Baguio Market Plaza Cooperative Multipurpose (Bamapcom), a traders group, which sought to draw government’s attention to Tax Ordinance 2000-01 that allows the existence of peddlers and requires them to pay an annual tax of P100; allows for the existence of transient vendors in the city market and requires them to pay a market fee, commonly known as “cuartais,” based on the amount of produce they bring into the city market.”

The fees which the tax code allows government to collect from street vendors “effectively implies that the act of vending in and of itself is not illegal, but is a regulated activity,” and gives the vendors “the impression that they are legally allowed to sell even in areas where they block foot traffic,” said the Bamapcom resolution.

The night market collects P60 every time a peddler displays his or her wares at the Athletic Bowl, which should encourage street vendors to hold business there instead of the main streets, Canilao says.

But not all street peddlers have been convinced about the move.

A few vendors selling vegetables say the city government still needs to increase tourist traffic to the park to guarantee them profits.

“We sell all of our produce [at street corners] before 9 p.m., but we hear [peddlers at the Athletic Bowl] often go home with zero sales,” a vendor says.

A market leader had suggested that the night market should resume at the Baguio public market, which closes at 9 p.m., to draw more consumers and to maximize the century-old facility which is slowly undergoing rehabilitation.