DAVAO CITY, Philippines – The City Council on Thursday, December 14 repealed two city ordinances approved about six decades ago.
During the last regular session for 2017, councilors voted with finality the ordinances to repeal the city ordinance banning the use, playing, operation and maintenance of pinball machines and other similar devices and the ordinance prohibiting the operation of jukeboxes within public markets.
The ban on pinball machines was approved in 1960 while the jukebox ordinance was made into law in 1975.
Councilor Mabel Sunga Acosta, chair of the committee on publications authored and moved to repeal both ordinances.
On previous reports, Acosta maintained that these ordinances have to be abolished and removed from the Code of Ordinances of the city since the said devices are already obsolete and the policies are not relevant anymore.
“We look over the code and we found out that there are some ordinances that are not relevant already,” Acosta said in a press conference on November.
She said the effort to repeal and revise old ordinances form part of the plan to update local laws published in the Code of Ordinances and include more recent ones in it.
“Several ordinances need to be reviewed so that the second edition of the Code of Ordinances will be updated and those that are not relevant already will be repealed,” she said.
The Code of Ordinances of Davao City contains all general and special ordinances of the city from 1937 until its publication in 2009, when President Rodrigo Duterte was still the Mayor of Davao. (davaotoday.com)