Daluz: City Hall can fund P50-M Christmas bonus

Cebu City Hall needs to identify about P50 million in unused funds for Christmas bonuses of its 5,000 city officials and employees.

If you ask Cebu City Councilor Jose Daluz III, he believes this is doable.

He said contrary to the council’s perception, the city government is very liquid with about P2 billion in cash.

“But now we don’t have a cooperative council,” he said, which leaves the matter hanging.

The City Council has not yet aproved an earler P267.7 million supplemental budget request of Mayor Michael Rama, who has complained about the council’s “scrutiny” through an almost four-week review.

The city government released P10,000 per employee as a Christmas bonus last year.

“Hopefully it would still be the same this year. Knowing the character of the mayor, he won’t agree that the Christmas bonus will be lower than P10,000. In fact, it may even be higher,” said Daluz.

Daluz said the passage of another supplemental outlay may be unnecessary as long as Mayor Michael Rama can identify a fund source for the purpose.

Daluz, an ally of the mayor, said the city can fund the bonus as well as the P267 million supplemental budget 2 that remains pending.

He said about P600 million in unused funds was identified when he sat down with members of the Local Finance Committee (LFC) and prepared Supplemental Budget 2.

Daluz, former head of the council’s budget committee, said the release of bonuses may be authorized through passage of a resolution.

But Daluz said there is still no certainty that other incentives would be released for job order workers who are not entitled to receive bonuses.

As a practice, the city government gives out packed goods and rice to its job order workers for Christmas.

Councilor Leah Japson of the majority bloc asked the council during their Nov. 7 session why the appropriation for City Hall Christmas bonuses wasn’t included in SB2.

Japson said she doesn’t want the council to be blamed for the absence of bonuses the way they were blamed for non-passage of SB 2.

Daluz said there was still time to pass a supplemental budget 3 to include Christmas bonuses “if the council will cooperate.”

He said an option would be to identify unspent appropriations from the 2012 budget to be realigned for bonuses.