About | BetterLegazpi.org

What This Site Is

BetterLegazpi.org is a free, volunteer-run website about Legazpi City. We take information that is already public — service requirements, fees, office hours, budgets, ordinances, contact numbers — and put it in one place, in plain language, so you do not have to hunt for it.

A simple way to picture it: this is a guidebook to the city government, not the city government itself. A guidebook can tell you which counter to go to, what to bring, and roughly what it will cost. Only the office itself can actually issue your document.

Free to use. No account, no ads, no fees — for everyone.

Where the Official Records Live

BetterLegazpi.org is not the City Government of Legazpi, and it is not an official government website. We are an independent civic tech project, run by volunteers, and we have no authority to issue, certify, or decide anything.

The official website of the City Government of Legazpi is legazpi.gov.ph. For anything official — legal records, formal applications, final fees — that site and the city offices themselves are the authority. Where this site and an official city channel disagree, the official channel is correct.

In everyday terms: use this site to understand and prepare, then use the official channels to transact. If we say a document costs ₱100 and the office says ₱120, the office is right — and we would be grateful if you told us, so we can correct it for the next person.

Why We Built It

Say your PSA birth certificate is illegible and you need a fresh copy from the Legazpi City Civil Registrar, and you have never done it before. The usual experience is a scavenger hunt: a Facebook post from two years ago, a phone number that just rings out, a friend who half-remembers the requirements, or worse, a trip to City Hall that ends with “you are missing one document, come back tomorrow.”

That lost day is the problem this site exists to solve. For every service we cover, we try to answer the same four questions on one page, before you leave the house:

What do I bring? The actual list of requirements.
Where do I go? The office, and how to reach it.
What does it cost? Published fees, where fees exist.
How long will it take? Processing time and office hours.

None of this is secret information. It is simply scattered, and scattered information quietly costs people time, fare, and a day’s wages.

What You Can Expect

Here is what you will find on the site today:

A services directory. Around 50 city services, grouped into 12 everyday categories — certificates and records, business permits, health, housing, taxes and payments, education, employment, and more — plus dedicated pages for 26 individual offices and programmes.
Your elected officials. The mayor, vice mayor, and the 12 city councilors, with their positions and committees.
City news. Announcements and updates, gathered in one feed instead of scattered across social media.
Policies. Ordinances and resolutions passed by the city council, listed so you can actually find one.
Transparency. Budget and spending information, including infrastructure projects, presented as plain figures and tables.
Statistics. Population and demographic data, barangay information, and a directory of health facilities.
Travel and culture. Attractions, landmarks, food, accommodations, and local history for visitors and residents alike.
Search. One search box across the whole site, so you can type what you need rather than guess which menu it lives under.
It works on a phone. The site is built for small screens first, and once you have visited a page it stays available even if your connection drops.
Light and dark mode. Your choice is remembered on your device.
Built to be accessible. We aim for WCAG 2.1 Level AA, test every page automatically, and publish an honest accessibility statement naming the pages that still fall short.
Free and open source. Released under MIT and CC BY 4.0, so anyone can inspect the code, reuse the work, or build on it.

Languages

Public information is only useful if you can read it comfortably. Use the language button in the top bar — the icon — to switch. Here is exactly where each language stands, with no overstating:

English — available. This is the language the site is written in, and it is complete.
Filipino — available, still being checked. The navigation, footer, and a growing share of the pages are translated. The translation is machine-made and has not yet been reviewed by a native Filipino speaker, so while Filipino is switched on you will see a small notice with a link to report anything that reads wrongly. Official document names are kept in English alongside the translation on purpose, so the words still match the form in your hand.
Bikol — coming soon. It appears in the menu but is not selectable yet. We could switch on a machine translation tomorrow; we have chosen not to. Bikol deserves a human translation, and shipping a bad one would be worse than waiting. If you speak Bikol and want to help, we would genuinely like to hear from you.

A page that has not been translated yet simply stays in English rather than showing you a blank or a broken sentence. Nothing is ever hidden because of the language you picked.

Where Our Information Comes From

Everything here is drawn from publicly accessible information — official government portals, published documents and reports, and other public sources on the internet. We do not hold private records, and we do not publish anything that was not already public.

We link back to the source wherever we can, so you can check our work rather than take our word for it. Where a figure could not be matched to a readable official document, we leave it out instead of guessing.

Information changes, and sometimes we are slow to catch up. If you spot something out of date or simply wrong, telling us is the single most useful thing you can do for the next reader.

Who Makes This

BetterLegazpi.org is a volunteer effort, not a company and not a contractor. It was started by Rye Belen and is a member of BetterGov.ph, a volunteer-driven civic tech community working to improve access to local government information and services across the Philippines.

Nobody is paid for this, and the site accepts no advertising. You can read more about the people involved on our FAQ page.

This site began as a fork of BetterSolano.org, built for LGU Solano, Nueva Vizcaya by Ramon Logan Jr., and was then retrofitted for Legazpi City. We are grateful for that groundwork.

How You Can Help

This is a community project, and it improves mostly because residents tell us things. You do not need to be a programmer to be useful:

Ways to contribute:

Report anything wrong, missing, or out of date — a wrong fee or a changed office hour is exactly the kind of thing we need to hear.
Help translate, especially into Bikol.
Contribute code, data, or design; the whole project is open source.
Share the site with someone who is about to queue for a document they could have prepared for.