Mindanaotoday.com | Cagayan de Oro councilor on few hours budget hearing: ‘It should be on a schedule basis’
By: Franck Dick Rosete
A minority legislator here has said the budget deliberation should be done on a schedule basis to carefully examine the programs and projects per department and determine if they allocated enough budget.
Councilor Jose Pepe Abbu Jr. made the remark when asked to comment on the recent 2024 budget deliberation in this city, where the proposed annual budget was approved at the committee level within more or less three to four hours, saying he couldn’t understand why the deliberation was not conducted according to its usual procedure.
“If you see something to scrutinize, all the better. But if there’s none, it is not necessary that you grill [them] because that’s not how the budget deliberation should be,” Abbu said in a mix of English and vernacular in an interview on Wednesday, November 22.
Last November 7, the city council committee of the whole conducted the 2024 executive budget hearing at one of the hotels here, where the P11.2-billion proposed budget next year was approved by the panel within the said time period.
Abbu, together with three other minority councilors, Yvonna Yacine Emano, Agapito Eriberto Suan, and Christian Rustico Achas, abstained from the approval.
After five days, the proposed annual budget under Ordinance No. 2023-331 was presented to the plenary during the city council session on November 13, where it was passed on its third and final reading.
In the province of Misamis Oriental, where Cagayan de Oro is geographically situated, its Sangguniang Panlalawigan took almost a week to deliberate their proposed P5.7 billion budget for 2024, which is only half of the budget of this city.
Misamis Oriental Provincial Administrator John Venice Ladaga said in a separate interview on Wednesday, November 22, that the council has just finished the deliberation and the proposed annual budget is set to be presented in the plenary next week.
When asked if Cagayan de Oro’s 2024 budget was properly deliberated, Abbu did not directly answer the question and just said he didn’t have specific knowledge as to the programs and budget of other departments as he wasn’t able to raise a question.
Minority Floor Leader Councilor James Judith II, on the other hand, said he checked the entire budget prior to the deliberation and coordinated with some of the department heads, especially those offices that have connections to his approved ordinances.
“So, on my part, what are the questions that need to be asked? Just those basics, and I studied before [the deliberation],” Judith said in vernacular.
The city councilors received the hard copy of the annual budget in the third week of October, two weeks before the deliberation.
Abbu said he doesn’t believe that the budget will be delayed if the deliberation isn’t finished during the November 7 deliberation, saying that previous members of the council had timely passed the previous annual budget through the proper procedure.
In his online program on Facebook on November 17, former city mayor Oscar Moreno doubted the city’s local revenues for 2023, which will be one of the sources for next year’s annual budget.
However, City Mayor Rolando Uy’s political spokesperson, BenCyrus Ellorin, said the Local Finance Committee had figured out how to meet revenue collection targets for 2024 through diligent and efficient collection of taxes like real property tax, business taxes, and other revenues.
He also said that there’s no need to raise current taxes or introduce new ones.
###