Technically, Cebu City Hall’s budget deliberations still have more than a month to go before the December 31 deadline, but every city councilor knows better than to wait that long before they roll out the “skin and bones” budget for next year.
Suffice it to say that the budget hearings in the City Council which is now dominated by the Team Rama bloc is far from proceeding well, especially in matters concerning the barangays.
Lately, the Team Rama bloc questioned the P330.8-million budget sought by the City Disaster Risk Reduction Management Office (CDRRMO), a 46 percent increase from this year’s budget, and told the proponents in no uncertain terms that they will block it unless it is revised.
Their beef stems from the creation of so-called barangay disaster management offices which they reiterate to be a duplication of functions in existing barangay offices.
Wasn’t it a few days ago when the Team Rama bloc raised a similar complaint on the Long Life Medical Assistance program of Mayor Tomas Osmeña which involves delivering daily the maintenance medicines to the doorsteps of beneficiaries?
The head of CDRRMO, Nagiel Banacia, said the bulk of the budget will pay for the capability trainings and equipment for the emergency response teams that will be deployed to every barangay.
But we are inclined to believe the Team Rama bloc’s contention that these barangay disaster management offices, just like the medical aid program, are merely extensions of City Hall and Mayor Osmeña, who had no pretensions about the motives behind these initiatives.
Plain and simple, these offices and the medical aid program are meant to offset the Team Rama bloc’s presence in the barangays where they still control the majority numbers and where any service or project will naturally have to pass through them.
Thus, it isn’t surprising that the Team Rama bloc continues to insist that things remain the same as they were when they were still in power, and their barangay officials get the lion’s share of the city’s funding.
Unfortunately for them, their mayor is no longer in office, and the incumbent city mayor knows he doesn’t have the number of barangay officials at his side just yet with the barangay elections deferred until next year.
As Osmeña is fond of repeating, what he’s doing now is payback for his erstwhile protégé’s refusal to allocate funds to barangay officials loyal to the Bando Osmeña-Pundok Kauswagan (BO-PK) in order to build his own political base.
Again, it’s still some time to go and the final numbers in the budget have yet to be drawn and signed into law, but even now, it’s time for both sides to arrive at a compromise and not have to resort to delaying the budget in order to resort to a reconstituted or reenacted budget.