Health tops list of priorities for Mandaue City in 2021 — Mayor Cortes

Mandaue City Mayor Jonas Cortes says the city government will focus more on its responses to health in 2021 and this thrust will be reflected on the proposed 2021 budget of the city. | CDN Digital file photo

MANDAUE CITY, Philippines — Mandaue City will focus on its responses to health for next year, and this can be seen on the proposed 2021 budget where departments or offices doing frontliner duties during the pandemic are expected to get a big chunk or an increase in their allocations for next year’s budget.

Mayor Jonas Cortes said it would be important to focus more not just on the COVID-19 (coronavirus disease 2019) responses but on other health issues as well.

Read: Mandaue reports 2 COVID-19 related deaths, 4 recoveries, 2 new cases on Oct 12

“Tagaan nato’g dako’ng pagtagad ang sa health, City Health Office. Ako nang gi-ingnan si Dr. Obenza (CHO) nga it’s high time nga ikuan gyud nato nga ifocus ang attention sa vaccination nga dili nato makalimtan kay sagad mahitabo we focus more on COVID niya mawa nata sa uban,” Cortes said.

(We will focus more on the health, City Health Office. I told Dr. [Dominga] Obenza [of the CHO] that it is high time that we focus our attention on vaccination and that we should not forget the other health issues because what is happening now is that we tend to focus more on COVID and our attention on the other [health issues] will be gone.)

“We don’t want nga magpatong-patong ato’ng problema nga aduna pa tay giatubang nga COVID-19.”, Cortes said.

(We don’t want our problems to pile up because we also have the COVID-19 to deal with.)

Read: With the pandemic, Mandaue City reports P500M collection shortfall

Lawyer Regal Oliva, Mandaue city treasurer, for his part, said the Executive Department had already prepared a proposed budget of around P2.4 billion to P2.5 billion for 2021. 

Oliva said that draft budget was P300 million to P400 million less than this year’s approved budget.

Oliva said that there would be departments that would have to decrease and would have increase their budgets for next year.

“There are also departments nga kinahanglan mo increase because they’re the frontliners in the pandemic — the City Health Office, City Hospital and Department of General Services,” he said.

(There are also departments that would need to increase [their budgets] because they are the frontliners in the pandemic — the City Health Office, the City Hospital and the Department of General Services.)

“But the other offices, like my office (the City Treasurer’s Office), have to decrease the budget. Travel expenses have to go, training expenses have to be reduced ,and maybe, in the purchase of vehicles, [this] might have to be suspended in a while,” Oliva said.

(But the other offices, like my office [the City Treasurer’s Office], have to decrease the budget. Travel expenses have to go, training expenses have to be reduced, and maybe, in the purchase of vehicles [this] might have to be suspended in a while.)

“These are expenditures in government which may be unnecessary during a pandemic….We need to focus more on more important and essential areas,” he said.

This October 16, 2020 is the deadline for the local budget to be endorsed to the Sangguniang Panglungsod (SP)./dbs