THE MOUNTAINEER

Less plans, more action
EDISON L. BADDAL

The plan of the government to rationalize the number of plans being required of the local government units to formulate is no less a big step in the right direction. The program, called rationalized planning system (RPS), purportedly aims to trim down the number of plan outputs of the LGUs from a high of 33 plans to just two.

These will be the Comprehensive Land Use Plan (CLUP) and the Comprehensive Development Plan (CDO). Like a tenon fitted into a mortise, the two plans will integrate all other plans, hence they will be expectedly voluminous and comprehensive. Certainly, the LGUs would be relieved of the burden of having to make lots of plans if the program materializes. This should be so as on close scrutiny, the plans themselves are interrelated and oftentimes overlap.

Just imagine an LGU having to prepare an annual plan and other term-based plans within a span of three years that an LCE is in office.

Not only is it taxing but incurs a lot in terms of resources, i.e. material and financial, as well as material time of the LGU. Oftentimes, with the length of time spent in planning sessions which usually involve brainstorming, deliberations, discussions and finalization of plan outputs, the period for the implementation of the programs, projects and activities (PPAs) contained therein is unwittingly compromised.

Besides, the required plans often interlocked with each other in contents thus rendering some redundant and stupefied as far as promotion and advancement of development is concerned. Consequently, they are just shelved and disposed. In the long run, making many plans does not sit well with the brief term of office of the LCE as the constituents will feel shortchanged.

And to think that people oftentimes anticipate fast service once they enthrone local officials so that anything less will ignite cynicism among them. Ultimately, the vision of a self-reliant, globally competitive LGUs as the be-all and end-all of devolution is unwittingly prejudiced.

By and large, no less than the LCEs have been tenaciously complaining of such multifarious plans
mandated by statutes and issuances for LGUs to come up with. The code is the source of the prescriptive and mandator multi-sectoral annual development plan which is a sine qua non for the approval of the annual LGU budget by the local sanggunian and higher sanggunians.

The local development council, the local planning body in the LGU chaired by the LCE, is charged with formulating the plan. Meanwhile,the barangays are not spared from this codal requirement although they are the lowest-ranked LGUs.

At present, aside from coming up with the multi-sectoral annual development plan, LGUs are also
required to come up with the 10-year ecological solid waste management plan (ESWMP), revenue code, environment code, sanitation code, disaster preparedness plan, children’s code,
anestral domain sustainable plan, Integrated area public safety plan, executive and legislative agenda and many others which include minor plans like nutrition action plan, anti-hunger mitigation plan and local poverty action plan.

If one is to consider the contents of the major plans, one can observe that some of the plans
are interrelated as they have interlocking and recurring contents. The scenario is virtually anti-development and could lead to confusion, disorientation and disorderly pace in development. As for instance,the profile, contents, sectoral goals and objectives of the ten-year ESWM plan are interlocked with that of the environment code, disaster management plan and the ancestral domain sustainable plan and comprehensive land use plan.

Also, in the case of the socio-economic profile, which usually precedes every plan no matter the type and nature, it is repeated in all the plans, Hence, the profile is a boring content of the plans which could be practically done without.

Thus, with the rationalized planning system to streamline and integrate all presentday plans, LGUs will have more time to focus on coming up with strategies on how best to implement urgent projects and programs. Essentially, its resources will be directed to worthwhile development activities as they will only be required to formulate the comprehensive land use plan and the comprehensive development plan. The CLUP is among the currently required LGU plans while the CPD is a novel plan to be introduced to the LGUs under the RPS.

As the CPD will integrate all other plans within its fold, it will be a voluminous document with its ecological profiling to virtually cover all the aspects of the LGU that it is featuring.

The ecological profile will supersede the socio-economic profile of presentday plans and likewise stands as the foreword of the plan. Basically, the CPD will sort of become a mother plan side
by side with the CLUP. In the process, the plans to be integrated in the CDP like the disaster plan, ecological solid management plan and the like will become the simplified and abbreviated
systemic or action plans without need of a profile.

The systemic plans, though, are themselves plans with specific subject matter and purpose lifed out from the CPD. The latter simply contains specified projects and activities provided with allotments from the investible funds of the LGU. In effect, the distribution of the total
available resources of the LGU with the CPD serving as the umbrella of all required plans for the LGU will be put into proper order.

As conceived, the CPD will outlive an LCE’s term as it is a medium-term plan with a duration of 6 to 9 years. What’s more, LGUs will be able to realize savings not only in terms of finances
but materials.

Finally, the annual development plan will be renamed as local development investment program or LDIP for short.
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Planning is a normal executive function as it is an integral part of the bureaucratic process
in every formally organized polity. It is also an instrument for laying out the package of programs for achieving the vision of an organization or any entity. However, much as its importance in management is beyond question, it should not be a cause of disruption, much less delay, in the delivery of public service.

Therefore, as a tool for rolling out, identifying and prioritizing development programs, it should make the development process easier and manageable as opposed to the complicated, sporadic and uncoordinated mechanism that it is at present.

An LGU is both a political subdivision and a corporate entity. As a political subdivision, it is mandated to serve the general welfare of the people which consist of different sectoral publics. In this regard, it is deemed a service-oriented entity with the end in view of making life
generally salutary for the constituents.

As the LCE has an agenda to pursue in the course of his tenure, so a plan is necessary as a roadmap to realize those agenda. Considering the short term of the LCE, a simple but doable plan extracted out from the CDP will no doubt fasttrack the realization of his agenda. The agenda, comprised of the LCE’s campaign platforms that encapsulize his personal vision for his LGU,
should be the prevailing contents of the LGU local development investment plan during his term.

As a corporate entity, it operates like a corporation with its own name, continuous succession of leadership and the right to own,lease and sell properties. With the CPD serving as a broad menu of programs and projects by which projects are culled out for one year or three years at a time, the corporate aspect of the LGU is enhanced.

If anything, a working CPD will facilitate the formulation of the three-year LDIP or the one-year AIP. And if the prioritized programs in said plans are mostly tangible then a sizable portion of the investible LGU funds will be geared towards the construction of properties to be owned and managed as capital assets by the LGU.

In sum, the rationalized planning program will simplify to a general extent the whole planning
system of the LGUs. Although formulating the CLUP and CPD is by no means easy as
all knotty kinks have to threshed out especially the generation of necessary data governed by unpredictable variables like rate of in-migration and out-migration, mobility of the population and others, still it is a more than a given that the two plans basically smoothens the rough patches
of the roadmap to development.

After all, planning, it may be on words it should also be practicable, doable even as it should be commonsensical to be reachable and attainable. Also, less planning but more on concrete actions is the best strategy for bridging the gap between a vision/agenda and reality. Anyhow, the LGUs, represented by LCEs, exist not just to formulate plans but to initiate actions from such plans for the benefit of the constituents.

The big and expanding economies of Asia do not have voluminous plans. All that they
have are short and practicable plans. I even read somewhere that a hugely successful Southeast
Asian country has just a three - to - five-paged yearly development plan.

However, this is regularly culled out from a master thirty-year comprehensive development plan which was formulated through massive research several decades ago.

In his poem “If”, Rudyard Kipling rhapsodized the futility of dreaming (read: planning) without the necessary actions in the following lines: “Dream and not make dreams your master. Think and not make thoughts
your aim.”