Press Release
November 12, 2016

Sen. Grace Poe on emergency powers
Excerpt from a student forum organized by the 2016 Students' PR Congress and the
Public Relations Society of the Philippines
De La Salle University, Manila
Nov. 12, 2016

I am tasked, being chairman of the public services committee which includes air, ground and land transportation, to pass the emergency powers for the President to solve traffic. But let me tell you, we want to give that emergency powers already but it's not that easy. Even if we give that to them, you think traffic will be solved immediately? No. A lot of the things they can do now, like clearing the places with no parking zones, by making sure that there are enough parking lots, by making sure that law enforcers are actually doing their jobs. With the emergency powers, we have to be careful. Because they want to spend eight trillion pesos, can you imagine how much money that is. I said, we will give it but we need to put safeguards para hindi tayo pwedeng pagnakawan. Because the last time we granted emergency powers, this was in the early 90s when we had a lot of brownouts and because of that, we had to contract out more power plants. Until now, we have one of the most expensive power rates in the world and some people say it's because of the emergency powers. The government gave so much sovereign guarantees, yun bang kahit hindi gamitin yung kuryente na iyon babayaran pa rin iyan ng gobyerno. Kanino pinapasa ang gastos? Sa atin din, kaya nga tipid na tipid tayo...pero when you go to other countries like Thailand or Singapore...hindi naman nila binabayaran katulad ng pagbabayad natin.

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