Herbie Gomez The Grinch stole city hall’s Christmas
The Grinch stole city hall’s Christmas
Monday, 16 January 2012 00:00
THE Aquino administration should look into the city council's alleged mining connections. Miners, without a doubt, damaged our rivers. Cagayanons want to know the city officials who have been lawyering for mining firms and those who have enriched themselves by doing business with miners as haulers of chromite and other mining yields.
It's no wonder that a proposed resolution to "temporarily stop" all mining operations in the city following the Sendong devastation was blocked with lightning speed last week. The city council is a protector of miners! City hall has no respect for the intelligence of Cagayanons. It's move to block the antimining proposal was, without a doubt, an affront even to its neighbor, the Archdiocese of Cagayan de Oro and its leader, Archbishop Antonio Ledesma. The city council did this unmindful of the fact that Ledesma has long been a staunch environmentalist and has been very vocal against the evils of mining even when he was bishop of Ipil, Zamboanga del Sur.
The city council majority really thinks it can do anything it wishes and get away it simply because it has the numbers. Such unrestrained corruption and flagrant impunity have got to end.
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Will somebody please help me make sense of what the city council did just three days before Typhoon Sendong hit Cagayan de Oro? Sendong unleashed its fury on us in the evening of Dec. 16 up to the wee hours of Dec. 17. What the people need to know is that shortly before the storm, the city council passed Ordinance no. 12217-2011 approving and adopting a program under the P84.716- million City Disaster Risk Reduction and Management Fund (CDRRMF) or the Calamity Fund of 2011. The breakdown: P25.414 million or 30 percent for "quick response," and P59.301 million or 70 percent for "disaster preparedness."
The ordinance was approved "to effectively carry out the concept, intents and purposes of RA 10121, otherwise known as the Disaster Risk Reduction and Management System, and for this purpose authorizing the honorable city mayor to allocate funds for each of the herein items identified under the program." Based on the approved program, the funds were intended to buy equipment for rescue operations like rubber boats, ambulances and rain gauges. The funds were supposed to beef up disaster preparedness and mitigation through the acquisition of heavy equipment. Using this money, city hall planned to buy-- hold your breath!--another relocation site(!) and implement sanitation, solid waste (for the shady Basura At Iba Pa and other garbage collectors?) and infrastructure projects for flood control, street lighting, reforestation, nursery development and watershed rehabilitation. There were also unspecified "climate change" projects in the list.
In the same program are appropriations under "disaster rehabilitation" like repair and maintenance of roads and bridges, livelihood assistance, agriculture/fishery assistance and shelter assistance. In gist, the ordinance was supposed to "prepare" city hall, ensure "quick response" in the event of a calamity, and make it "effectively carry out" the law on disaster risk reduction and management. At first glance, we see a semblance of goodness.
But here's the catch: the ordinance was approved only last Dec. 13 or three days before Typhoon Sendong hit the city! How, pray tell, can city hall prepare for a disaster like Sendong in three days? The Dec. 13 ordinance is proof that city hall let its guard down from January to December 2011. There was no way it could have judiciously spent P84.7 million to implement the disaster risk reduction and management program in less than a month. It was already year-end. The question is, did they really plan to spend all that money for disaster preparedness before the new year? Or was the Dec. 13 ordinance intended to guarantee that city hall's Christmas would be very merry? (Three days later, the Grinch, through Sendong, stole Christmas).
I wonder, what if Sendong hit us much earlier, say November, when the P84.7-million ordinance was nonexistent? Common sense dictates that an ordinance like that should be approved during the first quarter of the year. But only on Dec. 13, 2011 did the city council authorize the mayor to spend the P84.7 million to put up a defense against disasters. I'm really curious to know exactly how they planned to buy the rubber boats and all the equipment, and implement all the projects as programmed 18 days before 2012. By no stretch of the imagination are these possible unless, of course, if the deliverables were already there long before the passage of the Dec. 13 ordinance. But that's like putting the cart before the horse, and I really doubt if that can pass off as a legal undertaking.
City hall officials, obviously, did not take the disaster risk reduction and management law seriously last year. If they did, they would have approved that ordinance much earlier and not at a time when the calendar year was about the end. The councilors who voted for the Dec. 13 ordinance were Adrian Barba, Alvin Calingin, Annie Daba, Jose Abbu, Ramon Tabor, President Elipe, Nadya Elipe, Juan Sia and Sunshine Mae Obsioma. Councilors Simeon Licayan, Ian Mark Nacaya and Alexander Dacer were out of the city council session hall when the ordinance was approved. Councilors Dometilo Acenas Jr. and Emmanuel Abejuela were absent. I guess they have a good excuse. Councilors Edgar Cabanlas and Roger Abaday abstained because they smelled something fishy. Something's really fishy indeed. Pastilan. E-mail: This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it
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