When historians eventually write about LGUs in the 2020s, Quezon City under Mayor Maria Joy Belmonte will deserve a chapter of its own – not for grand slogans, but for a quieter, harder achievement: running the country’s biggest and most complex city like a well-managed enterprise, without going into debt, while expanding free public services to millions of people who never had them before.
Consider the scale of what she manages. Quezon City is home to more than three million residents – roughly double the population of Manila – spread across 161 square kilometers, about four times Manila’s land area. It is, in effect, a small country’s worth of people and territory, with the traffic, housing pressure, flooding risk, and inequality that come with that size. Managing a city like this well is already difficult. Managing it without borrowing is rare. Managing it while becoming the richest local government unit in the Philippines, with 489 billion pesos in total assets and zero outstanding debt, is the kind of fiscal discipline most national governments struggle to achieve, let alone a city hall.
‘We have fundamentally rewritten the financial story of our city,’ Belmonte told her people, and the figures support the claim. The city’s budget more than doubled since 2019, climbing from approximately 22.75 billion pesos to 45.5 billion pesos this year, with a proposed 48.5 billion pesos for 2027. It accomplished this without imposing new taxes and while maintaining zero debt – a feat made possible by six consecutive years of Unqualified Opinions from the Commission on Audit (COA), the clean bill of financial health that few LGUs can claim even once, let alone six years running.
The Department of Finance recognized Quezon City as a Hall of Famer in Outstanding Revenue Performance, and the city now ranks first nationwide in locally sourced revenues, which grew from 19.3 billion pesos in 2019 to 28.4 billion pesos in 2025. This is the quiet engine behind everything else: a city that collects its own revenue efficiently does not need to borrow to fund ambition.
That fiscal strength is not an accident. It reflects seven years of deliberate budgeting choices, and it shows up most clearly in where the money goes. Of the city’s roughly 45 billion peso annual budget, more than half is channeled into social and public health services – not vanity infrastructure, not political patronage projects, but line items that touch ordinary residents’ daily lives: free bus rides, neighborhood health centers, scholarships, livelihood aid, and disaster-ready public spaces. This is public finance used as a tool for equity, not just an accounting exercise.
This year, the pattern of recognition Belmonte received, points to something more than ceremony. She was first recipient of the Exemplar City Mayor Award, jointly conferred by the Federation of Filipino-Chinese Chambers of Commerce and Industry and the Angelo King Foundation. She also became a three-time consecutive regional winner of the Presidential Lingkod Bayan Award from the Civil Service Commission, and placed among the country’s top-performing and most trusted city mayors in the independent Boses ng Bayan Index of Governance. A few days ago, Belmonte and her LGU was recognized as one of the Ten Outstanding Local Governance programs in the 2026 Galing Pook Awards. The award winning Kabahagi is a family governed care for Children with Disabilities that highlights the importance of compassionate and family centered public service .
On the international stage, she was selected as a judge for the 2026 Harmony in Diversity Award in Jakarta, serving alongside UN Special Envoys, Taken together, these are not a scattershot collection of plaques; they map directly onto the pillars of her administration – fiscal honesty, inclusive social policy, and transparent governance.
The clearest symbol of her inclusive philosophy is the QCity Bus Service Program, known popularly as Libreng Sakay. Since December 2020, the program has carried more than 51 million passenger trips, with ridership accelerating sharply in recent years as commuters sought relief from fuel costs and fare hikes. The city now runs a fleet of roughly 88 standard buses across eight strategic routes in 151 timed bus stops , supplemented by 16 fully electric buses equipped with free Wi-Fi, onboard CCTV, and wheelchair ramps – features typically associated with premium private transit, not a free municipal service.
What makes this program genuinely remarkable is that it is open to anyone passing through Quezon City, not just registered residents that has become a lifeline for students, for workers and for families in low-income districts who have, for years, absorbed the cost of unreliable and expensive jeepney and bus fares. This gives them savings up to P2,000 per month. A mayor who gives away bus rides for free, at this scale, for this long, without bankrupting the city, is not performing populism – she is executing a budget strategy that treats mobility as a basic right.
Her physical projects reflect the same logic. The Quezon City Drainage Master Plan combines structural and nature-based flood solutions. Project TERRA repurposes public facilities, such as basketball courts, as rainwater detention basins. Five new community detention basins are under construction while eight more are undergoing feasibility study. She converted the Quezon Memorial Circle Open Field and the City Hall Lagoon into dual-purpose green spaces that will double as rainwater-retention facilities, together holding more than 14,000 cubic meters of stormwater during heavy rains – solving a drainage problem while preserving public recreational space.
On peace and order, Project Aurora connects over 3,000 CCTV cameras city-wide, centralized in an AI-powered command center. Belmonte also reiterated her Zero Tolerance Policy against abuse of power by all law enforcement personnel from policemen to barangay officials.
The same instinct for accountability runs through the city’s digital transformation. The QC eServices platform now serves more than 3.5 million registered users across 245 active online services – an extraordinary figure for a single city government. Inside it sits the ‘Resibo ng Serbisyo’ Open Data Suite: QC Open Infra, which lets any resident track city-funded infrastructure projects, contractors, and budgets on a live map; and QC iReport, which turns a photo of a broken streetlight or uncollected garbage pile into a trackable service ticket.
The most understated accomplishment of the Belmonte administration is that its systems are built to outlast any single term or personality. A digital ID system with 1.5 million active registrations, an open data dashboard that any successor would find politically costly to dismantle, a hospital network already unified around shared protocols, and a bus fleet with committed multi-year routes are not easily reversed by a change in leadership. This is the opposite of governance built around a charismatic figurehead; it is governance built around durable institutions that happen to have a capable administrator at the helm.
Quezon city is a rare, functioning case study rather than a theoretical model – proof that an LGU of significant scale can run a budget surplus, deliver free transit to tens of millions of riders, and still rank among the most trusted governments in the country. A city of three million people, four times the size of Manila and double its population, is not easy to run cleanly.
Its zero debt, 489 billion pesos in assets, and stack of credible – not self-congratulatory – awards suggest that under Joy Belmonte, it is being run not just cleanly, but well. Seven years into her tenure, the city stands as a working argument that honest, data-driven, service-first local governance is not an aspiration- it is achievable, measurable, and, in her city’s case, already here. (next)
Rebranded, not reformed: Why Hiraya Water still owes answers to this nation
A company whose entire business is water skipped an inter-agency meeting about a looming El Nino water crisis. That single fact should alarm every water consumer living in the 75-plus Local Water Districts tied to Hiraya Water Corp., formerly PrimeWater. When former DPWH, now DOTr Secretary Vince Dizon called the no-show an insult to the President, the government, and ‘most importantly, insulto ‘yan sa mga taga-Pampanga,’ (it’s an insult to the people of Pampanga) he was naming something consumers already suspect: this company does not believe it owes the public an explanation.
Consider what that meeting actually was. With a strong El Niño expected to persist into the first half of 2027, government agencies and water districts gathered in Pampanga to coordinate before drought conditions hit. The provincial government called Hiraya. LWUA called Hiraya. Every other water district showed up. This was the moment a water operator is expected to present projections, flag vulnerable areas, and disclose contingency plans before people start losing access to water. Hiraya’s seat sat empty. If there was a legitimate reason, the company owes the public that explanation now. Silence here is not neutral – it is an answer, and not a reassuring one.
What makes this absence worse is the sleight of hand behind it. PrimeWater did not fix its problems before relaunching under a new name – it changed ownership and identity while carrying forward every contract and every unresolved complaint. Dizon put it plainly: ‘Iba na may-ari niyan, iba na ang pangalan. Pero hindi siya sumipot.’ (It’s a different owner under a new name, and did not attend this meeting). A new name does not dissolve joint venture agreements with 75-plus water districts nationwide. It does not erase Senate complaints about weak pressure, service interruptions, and poor water quality. It does not account for unfulfilled investment commitments, or make whole the districts that had already begun trying to exit their PrimeWater partnerships before the rebrand. A corporate facelift is cosmetic. The obligations underneath are contractual and unpaid.
This is why the no-show cannot be dismissed as a scheduling failure. It previews how new management intends to treat the water districts and millions of consumers it inherited. If a company won’t show up for drought planning, what confidence should any district have that it will show up when a pipe bursts or a community demands answers?
That is why this is no longer a Pampanga problem. When one private operator holds agreements with more than 75 LGU -owned water districts, its failures are a nationwide water-governance crisis, not isolated local disputes. El Niño does not respect provincial boundaries, and neither should government’s response to an operator that won’t reliably participate in crisis planning.
The appropriate response is not another strongly worded statement – it should be a systematic, nationwide accounting: water district by water district, what PrimeWater promised, what it delivered, what remains unfinished, and what Hiraya now commits to complete under its own name. Regulators should compile this ledger publicly now, not after the next missed meeting.
Former DPWH now DOTr sec Dizon’s warning was correct, but a warning is not a remedy. Hiraya inherited contracts covering millions of our people’s access to water. It does not inherit a clean slate along with them. Changing a name is easy. Proving what has actually changed is the only thing that matters now – and with El Niño bearing down, time is not on everyone’s side.