Refocusing on local governance

PUNCHLINE

Ike Seneres

The bottom line of the pork barrel issue is local governance. In theory, the purpose of the pork barrel is to fund local development needs that could not be “seen” by Congress as it approves the General Appropriations Act (GAA) for each fiscal year.

Pursuing that theory, the Congress apparently came up with the legal fiction that whatever could not be “seen” by them as a whole assembly could be seen by the district Congressmen from their own local vantage point.

According to newspaper reports, the Lower House of the Congress has already decided to “scrap” the old pork barrel system, apparently replacing it with a new system that would focus more on line item budgeting, although it seems that the Congressmen could still “recommend” their own local projects subject to the approval of the appropriate House Committee and the corresponding implementing line agencies, i.e. the National Government Agencies (NGAs).

As it is now, most if not all of the NGAs have their own branch offices at the local levels. What that means is that all of these branch offices are in a position to “see” the local development needs from their own vantage point, at least in theory. You can add to that the theory that the career NGA officials in these branches are probably more technically competent to “see” these needs, with a better “sight” than the Congressmen.

The prerogative given to the district Congressmen to “see” local development needs seems to be based on the assumption that on their own, acting as individual observers, they could “see” the needs better than anyone else, presumably better than the career NGA officials, supposedly acting as a team of experts. In reality however, there are Local Development Councils (LDCs) that could work together collectively to “see” these needs.

As it turns out, all district Congressmen, together with the career NGA officials and the Local Government Unit (LGU) officials are all members of the LDCs, meaning that there is already an existing venue or forum where all of them could collectively “see” all of the local development needs, putting together all of their eyes and brains.

As a matter of fact, there is a separate Executive Order that empowers all district Congressmen to become de facto members of these LDCs, in addition to what the Local Government Code (LGC) already stipulates.

The idea of allowing the district Congressmen to “recommend” their own projects seems to be based on the reasoning that they could identify local development needs subjectively on their own, acting as individuals, without consulting with the LDCs.

The ideal and logical option of course is for them to work collectively with the LDCs, thus they would be acting objectively with the other LDC members. If the proper process is to be followed, it should be the branch offices of the NGAs that should recommend projects to their head offices, so that these projects could be included in their line item budgets.

Going straight to the point, all provinces should have their own Medium Term Development Plans (MTDPs) that should be based on their own Comprehensive Land Use Plans (CLUPs). That is about as objective as everyone at the local levels could get, using a process that is very transparent. More so if Geographic Information Systems (GIS) are used, it would already be possible to “see” all local development needs, without anyone missing out on anything.

We know what really happened in the pork barrel scam and we should deal with that reality. For the most part, the pork barrel was used not to deliver projects to the local levels, but to deliver kickbacks to the pockets of corrupt Congressmen. It was almost a rule of thumb, that politicians would “invest” money in their political campaigns, expecting that they could earn, yes earn “profits” in the form of pork barrel kickbacks. Hopefully, the shift to line item budgeting would change all that.

What should be declared as local priorities should depend on the consensus of the LDC members. That is the advantage of many council members thinking and acting collectively, rather than just one Congressman doing it for everyone else. On my part, I believe that all priorities should be based on the MTDPs. What I mean is that there should be a process of elimination, meaning to say that what should be submitted for priority funding should be those projects that could not be funded under the line budgeting approach.

As I see it, there should be a differentiation between public services and development needs in the planning process. Public services should be intended for the present, whereas development needs should be intended for the future. The prevailing thinking is that all public service needs should already be provided for in the usual and regular budgets of the LGUs, and other than that, their extra development needs would then need additional funding from national sources.

Technically, the GIS database should only be part of a broader LGU database that should include both the public services data and the development needs data. Since most LGUs could not afford to maintain these databases on their own premises, it may be best for them to already consider the option of cloud computing, so that they could enjoy the advantages of data center virtualization and big data.

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