Commonwealth Act No. 58

Also known as: The Charter of the City of Cebu (the Act's own Section 1 name) · An Act Creating the City of Cebu (the long title) · CA 58 · The Cebu City Charter

The fifth taste Ikeda named in 1908, the UV-Express van, Cebu City's charter, and the case the corpus has carried since vic-sotto

Definition

Commonwealth Act No. 58 — “An Act Creating the City of Cebu,” approved on October 20, 1936, and enacted by the National Assembly of the Philippines — is the statute that incorporated Cebu City as a chartered city; Section 1 provides that the Act “shall be known as the Charter of the City of Cebu.” It declared the city a political body corporate with perpetual succession, fixed its territory as the then territorial jurisdiction of the municipality of Cebu, erected a mayor-and-Municipal-Board government with the mayor appointed by the President of the Philippines, and took effect upon approval. The city government it authorized was inaugurated on February 24, 1937, the date the city now commemorates under Republic Act No. 7287 as Cebu City Charter Day. (LawPhil — Commonwealth Act No. 58, Wikipedia — Cebu City, LawPhil — RA 7287)

The Act carries no author’s name on its face: the authorship of Assemblyman Vicente Rama of Cebu’s fourth district — the “Father of Cebu City” — rests on his biographical record and the city’s commemorative tradition, which hold that he authored and sponsored the cityhood bill that President Manuel L. Quezon approved into law on October 20, 1936 — the same record and caution this wiki’s Vicente Rama entry carries. (Wikipedia — Vicente Rama)

Identities

Source Type	Identity
Wikipedia	N/A — no standalone article for the Act; the charter is treated in Wikipedia’s Cebu City and Vicente Rama articles (verified this session)
Wikidata	N/A — no matching item found in Wikidata search this session
DBpedia	N/A — dbpedia.org unreachable this session
ProductOntology	N/A
Wiktionary	N/A
Library of Congress Subject Headings (LCSH)	N/A — id.loc.gov unreachable this session (HTTP 502)
MeSH	N/A
NCBI Taxonomy	N/A
AGROVOC	N/A
Google Scholar	Commonwealth Act No. 58 Charter of Cebu City 1936 Vicente Rama cityhood chartered city National Assembly Philippines municipal board
ConceptNet	N/A — API unreachable this session
OpenCyc	N/A

Also Known As

The Charter of the City of Cebu (the Act’s own Section 1 name)
An Act Creating the City of Cebu (the long title)
CA 58
The Cebu City Charter

Examples and Analogies

A city made by statute: like the other Commonwealth-era city charters, CA 58 is a complete local-government code in one act — incorporation, boundaries, officials, courts, taxes, and even saloons — the instrument by which a municipality became a chartered city. (LawPhil — Commonwealth Act No. 58)
An appointed executive in a colonial frame: the charter’s mayor was named by the President with the consent of the Commission on Appointments — very different from the elective city government that followed. (LawPhil — Commonwealth Act No. 58)
Verified charter data:
Approval: October 20, 1936; effectivity upon approval (Section 112) (LawPhil — Commonwealth Act No. 58)
Government: a Municipal Board of the mayor and seven elective councilors as the legislative body (Sections 12–13); six city departments — engineering and public works, police, law, fire, finance, and assessment (Section 19) (LawPhil — Commonwealth Act No. 58)
Fiscal powers: an annual real-estate tax of seven-eighths of one percent of assessed value (Section 62), one-fourth of it earmarked for free public primary schools (Section 75) (LawPhil — Commonwealth Act No. 58)
Police jurisdiction: three miles into the Bay of Cebu and a two-and-one-half-mile land zone around the city (Section 6) (LawPhil — Commonwealth Act No. 58)
Commemoration: February 24 of every year, a special nonworking holiday in the City of Cebu under RA 7287 (March 24, 1992) (LawPhil — RA 7287)

Usage Scenarios

1. Researching the Legal Birth of Cebu City

The Act is the primary source: students of the city’s legal identity work from its articles — corporate character (Article I), the city government (Article II), the Municipal Court (Article VI), taxation (Article IX), the transitory provisions (Article XII) — rather than from commemorative paraphrase. (LawPhil — Commonwealth Act No. 58)

2. Studying Commonwealth-Era City Charters

CA 58 is a specimen of the 1930s charter genre: an appointed mayor answerable to the Secretary of the Interior, presidential appointment of the fiscal, judge, treasurer, engineer, police and fire chiefs, assessor, and schools superintendent (Section 21), and city ordinances subject to the Provincial Board of Cebu’s approval with appeal to the Department of the Interior. (LawPhil — Commonwealth Act No. 58)

3. Charter Day Commemoration

Each February 24 the city marks its foundation anniversary under RA 7287’s special nonworking holiday “to be known as Cebu City Charter Day” — the living observance of the 1937 inauguration the charter made possible. (LawPhil — RA 7287, Wikipedia — Cebu City)

4. Tracing the Author to the Assemblyman

Biographical and commemorative research routes the Act through Vicente Rama — assemblyman for Cebu’s fourth district in the first National Assembly, whose record credits him with the bill approved October 20, 1936 — the attribution this wiki’s Vicente Rama entry documents. (Wikipedia — Vicente Rama)

Strategies

Legislate the city into being: Rama’s route to “Father of Cebu City” was a single statute — converting municipality to chartered city by National Assembly act — the strategy that made one law outweigh a whole career. (Wikipedia — Vicente Rama)
Write the charter as a complete code: the Act’s drafters packed incorporation, government, courts, taxation, and licensing into one instrument with transitory provisions for the first mayor and board — a self-executing design meant to stand up a city on approval. (LawPhil — Commonwealth Act No. 58)
Protect the watershed and the bay: Section 6’s police jurisdiction — three miles of bay and a two-and-a-half-mile land belt — shows the charter thinking beyond the street grid. (LawPhil — Commonwealth Act No. 58)
Earmark for education: the one-fourth real-estate-tax share reserved for free public primary schools tied the new fiscal power to the Commonwealth’s schooling agenda. (LawPhil — Commonwealth Act No. 58)

Security and Safety Measures

Police power written into the charter: the Act clothed the city with police jurisdiction over its waters and environs and created the police department as one of the six charter departments — public order as a founding function. (LawPhil — Commonwealth Act No. 58)
Fire protection by design: a fire department appears in the charter’s departmental structure, with the fire chief a presidential appointee — the era’s institutional answer to the burn vulnerability of a wooden city. (LawPhil — Commonwealth Act No. 58)
Safeguards on the city’s purse: the charter capped the annual real-estate tax at seven-eighths of one percent, fixed delinquency surcharges, capped special assessments at sixty percent of the cost of improvements while apportioning them to actual benefits, and imposed a five percent franchise tax on public-utility gross receipts, subject to amendment by the National Assembly — fiscal discipline written into the new corporation. (LawPhil — Commonwealth Act No. 58)
For researchers: cite the Act’s text from the statute record, its authorship to Rama’s biographical record, and the February 24 commemoration to RA 7287 — keeping statute, biography, and commemoration distinct, the discipline this entry follows. (LawPhil — Commonwealth Act No. 58, Wikipedia — Vicente Rama, LawPhil — RA 7287)

Historical Context

The Act belongs to the Commonwealth’s chartering wave. Cebu’s municipality — its city status under the Spanish crown long invalidated, as the city’s record recounts — was elevated by the National Assembly in the same era that incorporated other Philippine cities; the reference record adds that the revived city of 1936–1937 absorbed the former municipalities of El Pardo, Mabolo, Talamban, Banilad, and San Nicolás, and that the renewed charter took effect with the city’s inauguration on February 24, 1937, with Alfredo V. Jacinto serving as mayor when the city’s status was restored by law. (Wikipedia — Cebu City)

Vicente Rama — publisher of Bag-ong Kusog, assemblyman since 1935 — is the political author the record carries: his bill for Cebu’s cityhood was approved into law on October 20, 1936, earning him the “Father of Cebu City” title. The charter’s transitory article organized the city government after the mayor’s appointment and the board’s election at the next general elections; Section 111 kept the new city the provincial capital and part of its second assembly district. Six decades later, Republic Act No. 7287 (approved March 24, 1992) fixed February 24 as Cebu City Charter Day, a special nonworking holiday — the commemorative afterlife of a 1936 statute. (Wikipedia — Vicente Rama, LawPhil — Commonwealth Act No. 58, LawPhil — RA 7287)

Challenges and Controversies

The Authorship Question

The statute’s text names no sponsor; Vicente Rama’s authorship rests on his biographical record and Cebu’s commemorative tradition — well-established but biographical rather than statutory, the distinction this wiki’s Vicente Rama entry and this entry both observe. (LawPhil — Commonwealth Act No. 58, Wikipedia — Vicente Rama)

A 1936 Frame in a Modern City

The charter’s structure — an appointed mayor, a seven-member board, ordinances approved by the provincial board — describes a city that no longer exists in form: Cebu City is today a highly urbanized city administratively independent of the province, the core of Metro Cebu. The Act survives as the founding instrument rather than the operating code. (LawPhil — Commonwealth Act No. 58, Wikipedia — Cebu City)

Boundary Making and the Absorbed Towns

The charter fixed the city’s territory as the municipality’s existing jurisdiction; the record of dissolved neighboring municipalities — El Pardo, Mabolo, Talamban, Banilad, San Nicolás — folded into the revived city frames the boundary question cityhood settled, a consolidation the statute itself never names. (LawPhil — Commonwealth Act No. 58, Wikipedia — Cebu City)

The Vagaries of Charter-Day Memory

The date the city marks — February 24, 1937 — is the inauguration, not the approval date the statute carries (October 20, 1936); the two anniversaries of one act circulate in public memory. (LawPhil — Commonwealth Act No. 58, LawPhil — RA 7287)