ONE in every five Filipinos now lives in cities. The good news is that Philippine cities do well in sports development, road construction, and disaster preparedness. Most city governments are also able to process business permits and birth, death, and marriage records within one day. All have health centers and almost all had set up senior citizens affairs offices. Indeed, most of the local governments in the country's 73 cities rate their performance as either promising or good, according to a study by the Department of Interior and Local Governments.

Now for the bad news: our cities aren't doing too well in the delivery of public goods and services. For example:

• Unemployment rate in cities is at a high 19 percent.

• Only one city reported that all its households had toilets. Only three said all households had access to potable water.

• Hospitals in only 60 percent of the cities complied with standards.

• Only 34 percent of cities had literacy rates within the 97 percent national literacy rate as of 2000. Classrooms in only 19 percent of the cities met standards.

• No city complied with the standard of one cop for every 500 population. Majority had 1:1,000 to 1:1,999. One city had one cop for every 6,192 population. None of the jails in the cities provided a three-square-meter space for every inmate.

Garbage disposal remains a problem. Nearly all cities have garbage trucks, but a few in Luzon failed to provide any garbage services at all. In fact, 14 percent of the average 90,106 metric tons of garbage generated by each city in Luzon in 2000 was left uncollected. Mindanao cities managed to collect only 73 percent of their average 10,289 metric tons of garbage. Close to half of the 73 cities admitted that garbage was dumped on the streets.

The cities' sewerage system is as problematic. Nearly half of all cities do not have a functional sewerage system. Nearly half have only two to three serviceable fire trucks and an equal number of serviceable ambulance units. Two cities in Mindanao don't own an ambulance at all. One Mindanao city does not have a single fire truck.

In fairness, city governments are not entirely to blame. For example, the Philippine National Police, not local government units, determine the number of cops in a locality.