In her consistent efforts to ensure stable and continuous power supply in Zamboanga City, Mayor Beng Climaco together with Vice Mayor-elect Rommel Agan facilitated a meeting between officials of the Western Mindanao Power Corp. (WMPC) and Crown/Desco in Manila last week.

She said the meeting was to address WMPC’s concerns on the Letter of Credit issued by the bank.

Climaco said the Crown, which is managing the Zamboanga City Electric Cooperative, is amenable to making partial payment of around P70 million upon advance billing by WMPC as of June 17.

Final billing was to be made yesterday, June 25, in a meeting attended by Agan, representing the local government and power consumers of Zamboanga City.

It was also discussed that in order to extend the period of the compromise, intervention by the LGU might be needed to convince the Energy Regulatory Commission (ERC) to order the parties for the extension of the compromise.

Thus, ensuring continued power supply by WMPC. The LGU is ready to file for intervention, the chief executive said during the press briefing Monday.

Recall, the Zamboanga City Electric Cooperative (Zamcelco) under Desco/Crown Investment Management and the Western Power Corporation (WMPC) forged a 60-day compromise agreement last month, ending the rotational blackouts in the city.

Zamcelco Spokesman Ferdie Rodriguez announced this at a  press briefing, saying that the city’s electric cooperative had nominated power supply from WMPC, thus curtailment has been effectively lifted.

However, he quickly said “this does not mean no more blackout, considering that Zamcelco’s power distribution system is outdated and is experiencing outages due to certain technical fault in the distribution lines. With the compromise agreement, he said Zamcelco will now be able to provide power supply 24/7, barring technical hitches.-(Vic Larato)