BENGUET, Monday March 21, 2011 -- Tuba, Benguet is saddled with boundary disputes on all sides, with Itogon and Sablan in Benguet and San Manuel and Pugo in La Union. Still, none of these border conflicts is as urgent for resolution as that with Baguio, its immediate neighbor to the north.

Believe it or not, the border issue can be one for Ripley’s.

Reason enough for Tuba to support Baguio’s third bid for Congress to amend the city charter, partly to correct and erase such oddity, if only to restore Tuba’s geographical, political and legal integrity. And sanity.

If you plot out the technical description of Baguio’s metes and bounds under its city charter.

Members of the Senate’s committee on local governments, which last Wednesday heard Baguio’s renewed bid to revise its charter, were clearly sympathetic.

Committee chair, Senator Ferdinand Marcos Jr. joined in the hope of Baguio mayor Mauricio Domogan and city Rep. Bernardo Vergara that the third charter bill would finally “see light at the end of the tunnel”. Senator Marcos said the bill filed twice by Domogan and refiled by Vergara reached the Senate committee early into the 15th Congress.

An LCD (light crystal display) map projection on the wall of the J. P. Laurel Hall where the committee hearing was held, showed a plotting of the technical description of Baguio’s metes and bounds, covering an area of 57.4 square kilometers as per the revision in 1925.

A small, highlighted triangular portion near the boundary with Tuba showed that the Tuba police station and the Tuba Elementary School lie within Baguio.

More than three fourths of the Tuba municipal hall, shown as a red rectangular figure, also sits within Baguio.

Years back, a former Tuba mayor recalled how a municipal judge insisted that his sala be transferred to the other tip of the municipal hall to ensure court proceedings were within legal jurisdiction.

The pending bill will “relocate” Baguio’s metes and bounds so that Tuba’s municipal hall, police station and public elementary school will rightfully sit on Tuba soil.

That settled, Tuba would then address its border disputes with other neighbors, among them Sison, Pangasinan which appears to claim that some ancestral lands within Tuba are actually within its territorial domain. *(RD,PIO Baguio City//PIA CAR)