Baguio Disaster office upped to address calamities faster

By Jordan G. Habbiling

BAGUIO CITY -- The city government is now upgrading the City Disaster Risk Reduction and Management Office into a department to carry out all its mandates more efficiently.
    As proposed by Mayor Benjamin Magalong, CDRRMO was included as one of charter departments which will be created once the bill revising the charter of Baguio City is signed into law.
    To augment the number of personnel, the Early Warning and Surveillance Section (EWSS) and the Emergency Medical Service (EMS), both under the City Health Services Office (CHSO), will be transferred to the CDRRMO once it is established as a department.
    Magalong said the transfer of the EWSS and EMS is necessary to complement the needed manpower of the CDRRMO considering its immense duties and responsibilities as stipulated in Republic Act No. 10121 or the Philippine Disaster Risk     Reduction and Management Act of 2010.
    Section 12c of RA 10121 identifies 25 functions which the provincial, city, and municipal disaster risk reduction management offices shall perform.
    Antonette Anaban, CDRRMO head, said one aim of the CDRRMO this 2022 is to be recognized as fully compliant in the regional assessment by the Regional DRRM Council which can be achieved when the office is fully staffed.
    Anaban said the transfer of EWSS and EMS to the CDRRMO will also eliminate redundancy of functions as these two CHSO units respond to emergency cases during this COVID-19 pandemic which the CDRRMO also responds to. This will likewise optimize the utilization of resources in the city’s emergency response program, she added.
    Republic Act No. 10121 mandates the creation of local disaster risk reduction and management offices at the provincial, city, municipal, and barangay levels. In compliance with the law, the city council passed an ordinance in 1965 creating the City Disaster Coordinating Council with a corresponding yearly budget to be used for training, operation, equipping, supply, and maintenance of the committee.
    The CDRRMO was initially established under the City Administrator’s Office and was eventually transferred under the City Mayor’s Office as an office equivalent to a regular division. It is currently headed by a CDRRM-officer IV equivalent to a division chief of a city department.
    Once upgraded into a department, the CDRRMO will have its own department head and an assistant department head who will direct the short-term and long-term plans of the office to ensure that all city-wide efforts are aligned with the national and global disaster risk reduction management framework.
    Consequently, the Baguio City Council proposed an ordinance creating the CDRRMO as a department in support of the move of the executive department. The proposed ordinance was approved by the council on first reading and was referred to the Committee on Ethics, Governmental Affairs, and Personnel for review.
    Meanwhile, Assistant regional director Ruben Waces of the Civil Service Commission-Cordillera Administrative Region, advised the city government to formulate first the organizational development program of all the departments including the CDRRMO.
    Wacas said the correct organizational structure of the office needs to be identified first in preparation for its conversion into a department.
    He said there has to be a certain process which defines all the functions (apart from those ones provided by the national law), programs, projects, and activities of the CDRRMO. He stressed that coming up with an organizational development program comes first before identifying the staffing pattern of the offices.
    Atty. Agustin Laban, Head of City Human Resource and Management Office, mentioned that the city government will soon fully implement the organizational development program which identifies the mandates and functions of all the departments.
Anaban said they had already started drafting the manual of operations and the organizational structure of the CRRRMO and the CDRRMC.