Bonus woes

With the Capitol giving a  P20,000 yearend  bonus to  its employees,   Cebu City Hall staff  are left to wonder what they would receive for their own.
Some fancy budget footwork is needed to pull off generosity which City Mayor Michael Rama is proposing to the City Council as a supplemental budget for “calamity assistance” at P20,000 per employee.
The sticky part is that Cebu City wasn’t ravaged by supertyphoon Yolanda, and only sections of the city , like the belfry of Sto. Niño Basilica and the Pasil Fish Port, were  given a nasty shock during the October 15 earthquake.
Can we truthfully call all City Hall employees calamity victims? Why not call the amount what it is, a yearend cash gift for Christmas?
Apparently there’s no more  allowable monies   under the General Fund for  Mayor Rama to withdraw for employee benefits.  The treasury, however,  still has unspent funds for disaster response and risk reduction.
A more weighty sign that City Hall is wrestling with year-end cash flow difficulties is the non-release of the last tranche of an annual P10,000 subsidy for some 50,000 senior citizens.
Half of the P4,000 balance will be given in tomorrow’s Christmas program for the elderly.
(That’s still a very welcome P2,000 gift for all 60-year-old city residents and over, including former mayor Tomas Osmeña, who has been harping on Rama’s  unfulfilled promise for the elderly.)
Knowing how close to his heart the welfare of the elderly is, such that Rama pushed to increase the annual amount to P10,000 and once toyed with the idea of monthly releases, the incomplete subsidy is telling.
With one day to go before the seniors’ Christmas party and the City Treasurer’s Office admitting that it has yet to complete all their collectibles, the revenue shortfall may have to be compensated next year with the city government living on  half of its proposed P10.5 billion annual  budget.
Try as he might, Mayor Rama can’t further pressure developer Filinvest to pay up front the city’s joint venture share of more than P1 billion to shore up the annual budget and pay for the senior citizens’ cash aid.
Despite legal action the mayor threatened for Filinvest, he still has  to explain to  the city’s senior population whether he can keep his P10,000 promise.
We can compile a list of stories showing how  Rama’s administration is having a tough time meeting cash obligatons, but he would brush them aside again and say the problems would disappear  if he’s just given a free hand to sell lots in the South Road Properties without oversight by an unfriendly City  Council.
Senior citizens will probably forgive the charismatic mayor for his partial payout. But Cebuanos will remember the gap and still ask how City Hall intends to raise revenues other than relying on the SRP’s still raw revenue generating potential.