Congress should raise flood control funds to P25B, says Tañada

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MANILA, Philippines—With the massive flooding spawned by the southwest monsoon displacing thousands of residents in Metro Manila and neighboring provinces, a House leader on Friday suggested that funding for next year’s flood control be raised to P25 billion.

Deputy speaker Lorenzo Tañada III said that the government’s plan of hiking 2013 flood control funds to P17.5 billion should be upgraded to P25 billion due to the extent of damage that disasters have taken on recently.

He believes that the initial plan of sourcing P5.2 billion worth of additional funding for flood control programs can still be tweaked to add P7.5 billion more. “I think we can source another P7.5 billion for flood control without cutting any agency’s allocation of disassembling the proposed P2.006 trillion 2013 national budget.”

The “minor tweaking” that the lawmaker was referring to was sourcing the additional P7.5 billion from the Unprogrammed Fund which he said was the traditional source of Presidential stand-by spending authority. A budget of P117.6 billion has been proposed to be set aside for the said fund for next year.

He said “drawdowns” from the said fund would be made possible with the approval of the Sin Tax Law which is expected to rake in P30 billion worth of revenues. Under the General Appropriations Bill, the Unprogrammed Fund can only be tapped when revenue targets are exceeded or when a new tax law takes effect.

Tañada suggested that part of sin tax bill’s projected revenues be earmarked for flood control projects and be “justified as dividends of the gin-drinking, cigarette-smoking people in flood-prone communities.”

He said that this could be a “one-time provision, good for one or a couple of fiscal years” and then funding for flood control coming from sin taxes can be allocated for universal health care.
Additional funds can also be taken from the P22.4 billion Priority Social and Economic Projects Fund whose new feature was described by the lawmaker as being “a holding area for projects details of which have yet to be fleshed out by agencies.” An amount of P200 million has been earmarked for flood control under the said budget but Tañada believes that this can still be increased for the Department of Public Works and Highways and Metropolitan Manila Development Authority’s flood control projects.

For Tañada, the MMDA in particular needs augmentation since its proposed P300 million budget for flood control for next year was in fact lower than its funding for last year of P322 million.