Council to hold Saturday session for Rama budget

The Cebu City Council  is putting extra hours to work out the approval of the 2015 budget before Christmas.

To iron out all issues, the councilors huddled in a caucus yesterday morning where they decided to hold a special session in the afternoon with the approval of the 2015 budget amounting to 13.39 billion.

But in the special session, Councilors Gerardo Carillo and Noel Wenceslao asked for more time to study the budget ordinance, saying they only got hold of the prepared budget by the budget committee yesterday morning. They agreed to approve the budget today as some councilors already have other appointments on Monday.

The budget committee headed by Councilor Margot Osmeña has slashed Mayor Michael Rama’s P18.9 billion budget to P13.39 billion. Despite the cuts, if approved, 2015’s budget will be the biggest annual budget of the city. It is more than double – P7.5 billion more than the 2014 budget of P5.9 billion.

Inclusive budget

The 2015 budget and finance committee report said the trimmed down budget is still inclusive.

“In submitting next year’s budget of P13.39 billion, this committee would like to emphasize that the People’s Budget was given its utmost priority as well as the projects submitted by the barangays through the CDC and at the same time ensuring that no sector would be forgotten,” said Osmeña, reading a portion of the  budget and finance committee’s report on the annual budget.

In the committee report, Osmeña said the P13,397,367,359 budget will be sourced from regular sources (P5.25 billion) and other sources (P7.65 billion).

Regular sources include tax revenues (P2.98 billion), non-tax revenues (P770 million) and external sources (P1.5 billion). On the other hand, other sources include sale of disposed assets which are in the South Road Properties lots (P4.5 billion), SM and Filinvest (P490 million), auction sale of real properties (P50 million) and domestic borrowings (P3.1 billion).