After he lost this year’s mayoral election, outgoing Cebu City Mayor Tomas Osmeña will now turn over his former office to Mayor-elect Edgar Labella to start his term on Monday.
However, it appears that Mayor Labella will arrive at a bare Mayor’s Office after Osmeña decided to remove all of its fixtures, including the toilet seats, ceilings, dividers, and tiles as he ended his term.
The former Mayor cleared all of his properties from his former office, to which many netizens dub as a whole new level of pettiness.
As seen in the photos shared on social media last Friday, June 28, everything had been removed – from the ceilings and light fixtures to the glass dividers and pretty wall decors, down to the tiles on the floor, raw concrete can be seen everywhere. He also stripped all the fixtures from the toilets, its sinks, tiles, and even the toilet bowls and plumbing works.
Here’s a before and after photos of the Cebu City Mayor’s Office:
Many noticed that the office now looks like an abandoned construction site, compared to what it looked like before — stunning and elegant during Osmeña’s term.
Some netizens believe that this was clearly done to spite incoming Cebu City Mayor Edgardo Labella, considering that all those tiles, when removed, will surely get broken or damaged and would no longer be useful again.
Meanwhile, former City Administrator Bimbo Fernandez said that the outgoing mayor deserves the right to strip all his properties from his former office because he personally paid for the renovation of the City Mayor’s office on the eighth floor back when he assumed the position in 2016.
He added that Osmeña had requested for a budget to renovate the office, but this request was rejected, that’s why he paid everything ‘out of his own pocket’. Now that his term has officially ended, he’s just simply taking everything he put in that office.
Mayor Labella, on the other hand, was surprised by the former mayor’s gesture as he would have to assume office this Monday and what will greet his first arrival is a structure that could best be described as an abandoned construction zone.
Although Labella never expected this to happen, he still managed to turn the tables on the former mayor as he said that the scene of ‘ruins’ that Osmeña brought to the office could be easily described as “a microcosm of the way someone had left an entire city in shambles”.
For the meantime, the incoming mayor would have to find a temporary office as he awaits the completion of his permanent Mayor’s Office at the building’s ground floor.
source: buzzflare