MORE NEWS, PAMPANGA

Pampanga prov’l officials set court raps vs governor
By George Trillo

SAN FERNANDO, Pampanga — The Sangguniang Panlalawigan here passed last week a resolution paving the way for the filing of charges before the Office of the Ombudsman against Gov. Eddie Panlilio for his alleged refusal to implement the provincial ordinance to distribute taxes from local quarry operations. Vice Gov. Joseller Guiao told newsmen charges will be filed as soon as possible and will be signed not only by members of the provincial board but also by members of the Pampanga Mayors’ League.

“The governor has to be answerable for his failure to execute the law (Resolution No. 176 which the board passed into law in September last year) and be compelled to implement it,” Guiao said.

Resolution No. 176, titled “An Ordinance Providing for the Equitable Distribution of Quarry Taxes Imposed by the Province of Pampanga for the Extraction of Quarry Materials and for Other Purposes,” was initially endorsed by the PML headed by its president, Lubao Mayor Dennis Pineda on Aug. 28 last year and was passed into law by the provincial board on Sept. 21.

Panlilio immediately vetoed the resolution. The provincial board members, however, used their override function on Panlilio’s veto. “There is no more excuse for the executive not to implement the local legislation.

The contention that implementing rules and regulations still have to be done is a lame excuse,” said Guiao who has been at odds with the priest-turned-governor since day one of the Panlilio administration in July last year. “They (in the provincial executive department) brought the matter to the Court of Appeals which dismissed their complaint, and then also to the Department of Justice which rendered a decision in our favor.

Now they’re saying that implementing rules and regulations are still needed,” Guiao noted. The resolution scrapped the P150 administrative fee share of the provincial government from the P300 fee imposed on each truckload of lahar sand taken from various quarry sites in Pampanga. Under the old scheme, the provincial government collects its P150 share from the P300 in additIon to the 30-percent share from the remaining P150 which is also divided among the host municipal government and the barangay at a ratio of 30 percent and 40 percent, respectively.

The new ordinance also removed from the governor the power to supervise the collection of quarry taxes and transferred this power to the mayors where the quarry sites are located. Guiao said that the provincial board had given Panlilio up to last Jan. 30 to implement the local law. “But he has not only communicated with us on this deadline; he has ignored us. As governor, it is his mandate to execute the law,” Guiao also said.

Guiao said that the resolution passed by the provincial board last Monday was the first step in the filing of formal charges against Panlilio before the Ombudsman. “The next step would be the actual filing by our designated lawyer, and we want this done soonest,” he said. Guiao said the board has yet to decide on its lawyer, but said it would probably be Vicente Macalino, who was also once Pampanga’s acting vice governor.

Over the weekend, Panlilio’s information office announced that his seven-month-old administration was about to break the record of P150.488-million income from lahar sand quarrying, that was set by government-owned Natural Resources Development Corp. (NRDC) in 1999. Panlilio said he introduced last Friday a new measure to safeguard against anomalies in the collection of fees from lahar haulers in this province through the use of monitoring tickets as an additional safeguard in the proper payment of tax and fee on sand that are hauled out of the province.