Mayors ask: Where’s the money?

GUIUAN, Eastern Samar—He sits on a hill 60 meters above sea level with a spectacular view of the sparkling turquoise water and tall crests—the kind favored by surfers—lapping at the shores.

For the last 24 years, Marianito Macasa has been peering at what lies beyond the blue horizon on the Pacific Ocean before him.

Last Nov. 5, the meteorologist of the Philippine Atmospheric and Astronomical Geophysical Services Administration (Pagasa) spotted 1,000 kilometers away what turned out to be a terrible monster.

“It was traveling in a straight path. Not once did it veer,” said the 48-year-old Macasa, who then alerted Manila and the towns along the path Super Typhoon Yolanda would take. He had unerringly pinpointed it.

The hourly bulletins the weatherman issued gave Mayor Christopher “Sheen” Gonzales time to mobilize the cadre of municipal workers to evacuate his constituents on the Guiuan peninsula and 20 islets around it and buy food provisions.

“It was difficult to convince the people,” Gonzales said. “Guiuan is the entry point of storms. We are used to this. I talked to them. I told them this is not a joke. This is different.”

The mayor then went on a forced evacuation mode, summoning police to get the people to designated shelters in each barangay (village).

Seated in his observation room on Pagasa’s P450-million Doppler radar dome in a newly constructed building towering 47 meters, financed and equipped by the Japanese government, atop the hill, Macasa nearly became the first casualty of Yolanda—designated overseas as “Haiyan.”

On Nov. 8, the typhoon, packing winds of up to 315 kilometers per hour, smashed the bulletproof glass windows and sent shrapnel flying inside the room, wounding him. Two soldiers came to the rescue. They tore down the door, which would not budge against the onrushing swirl.

More than 6,200 people were killed in Yolanda’s strike in Central Visayas. Guiuan accounted for 101 of the dead. Another 16 million were displaced and are now largely dependent on food rations from the government and international agencies. The houses of 4 million of them were either totally or partially destroyed. Thousands are still in tented encampments or evacuation centers.

The parabolic antenna and the computer in the observation room of the first solid-state transmitter in Southeast Asia that was installed in the radar dome were destroyed. The agency critical in alerting the nation of approaching storms remained out of commission today.

The facility is only one that needed to be fixed as the emergency phase of the Yolanda emergency is winding down and the government goes on the recovery and rehabilitation mode that, according to President Aquino, would require billions of pesos.

Mayors of local government units (LGUs) have pleaded for reconstruction aid from former Sen. Panfilo Lacson, named by Mr. Aquino last Dec. 10 as chief coordinator of the recovery program, and other Cabinet secretaries leading the implementing departments.

Gonzales said he approached Lacson during the visit of the rehabilitation “czar” in Guiuan on Jan. 26 that the suffering people were flocking to him, asking for assistance—to build their homes, for jobs, for all the things that mayors and politicians are asked to perform for their constituents from cradle to grave.

“We are having an extremely difficult time,” Gonzales said he told Lacson. The 33-year-old mayor, who served as vice governor of Eastern Samar at the age of 29, gave the former senator a list of a priority projects to rehabilitate—municipal buildings, health centers, community halls, schools—that would cost P164 million.

In interviews conducted with mayors during a four-day trip to the disaster zone last week, the Inquirer heard the same lament.

Gov. Joey Salceda of Albay, another doormat to the several dozen storms that whip the country from the Pacific annually, suggests that the government divide the disaster zone into regions and make the political kingpins there the overlords in the recovery program.

“Organize based on fairly sized operating environment and recognize primacy of elected dominant coalition,” Salceda told the Inquirer.

“It is very important that there should be ownership by the affected or the stakeholders. The primacy of local governments should be clear from the start since they have mandates and are accountable under the law,” said the former presidential economic adviser whose template for disaster preparedness in Albay has received rave reviews.

Keep faith on LGUs

In a letter she sent to Lacson two days before his trip to Guiuan, former Mayor Annaliza Gonzales said that the “national government is too distant and insulated from field realities to be responsible to each locality’s unique needs.”

The resources of LGUs are “severely limited while the people’s needs are enormous,” the older sister of the current mayor said, adding that there is no “fit-for-all remedy that would apply.”

She urged the administration to provide available funds in the calamity area and “to fully empower local governments to disburse and manage the funds in the most responsive and

responsible manner.”

“We urge the national government and its functionaries to trust that local governments are capable of providing the most appropriate and timely support to their constituents who are still in dire need of assistance at this time,” said the former mayor who had served Guiuan for nine years.

Mayor Percival Ortillo Jr. of Marabut in Samar province scratched his head when asked about the Aquino administration’s recovery program.

“I’ve been hearing from news reports that billions of pesos are available for rehabilitation,” Ortillo said, referring to the P4-billion supplementary budget the President signed at the turn of the year. “I have not seen or felt that.”

Ortillo holds office in the municipal legislative hall. The room is cramped. His ragged staff members are working on a dozen desks that had to be navigated to reach him.

Yolanda ruined millions of coconut trees and scratched down to its brown roots. But with the incessant downpours during this rainy season, the mountains have turned green and tufts of leaves are sprouting on the coconut tree tops that survived decapitation by the swirling wind.

Ortillo did pretty well getting his 18,500 people belonging to 6,200 families out of harms way, evacuating them to schools, churches and two caves. Death toll in the town was 30. “They were the hard-headed ones,” he said of the fatalities.

The mayor was out of town when Lacson paid a surprise visit there last month, but he had prepared a 93-page report of damage and rehabilitation financing of P729 million for relocation of the survivors in the 40-meter coastal “no-build” zone and repair of public infrastructure.

“This is all I need,” Lacson told the Marabut staff.

‘Nothing seen so far’

In the absence of government action, the Catholic charity Caritas and the International Committee of the Red Cross based in Geneva have offered to build 300 houses for the displaced.

“The problem is the government does not trust the municipalities,” said Ortillo, a 49-year-old lawyer who is president of the League of Mayors for Western Samar.

Lacson does not have control over government funds, Ortillo said. “He is going to have a hard time.” The mayor asks why Secretary Mar Roxas of the Department of the Interior and Local Governments is in charge of

rehabilitation of the LGUs.

“It is not an implementing agency, it is an advisory body for mayors,” Ortillo said. “It has been three months. We have seen nothing so far. The NGOs (nongovernment organizations) that have helped in the emergency phase are only now conducting assessments on

rehabilitation.”

The people of Marabut—half of whom depend on coconut farming and the other half on fishing—are not hungry, he said. There are still food donations from the international agencies, he pointed out, but that the government should now move fast on the provision of housing and livelihood.

Ortillo said it would take years for replanted coconut trees to bear fruits.

Almost all the houses in the area have been damaged—just like in Guiuan. But here there are more people in evacuation centers and leaky state-constructed bunkhouses that get flooded during the rain.

In a news briefing in Malacañang last month, Lacson acknowledged government shortcomings in dealing with the shelter problem. He said that while the National Housing Authority had identified sites for the relocation of the uprooted, there was no government fund immediately available to proceed with the permanent shelter program.

Lacson has announced a program to involve big businesses to take a major role in the rehabilitation efforts, appealing to their avowed corporate responsibility to help deal with Yolanda’s devastation.’

No rest for the weary

While offers of help have been made to Guiuan that were yet to materialize, Mayor Sheen Gonzales said he was scrapping the bottom of the barrel to meet the needs of his straggling town and more storms heading his way in the next several months.

Gonzales has received high marks from charity agencies working in his district, where he had made innovations in disaster relief, including allowing the setting up of a radio station by the British NGO Internews for emergency broadcasting.

Steve Muncy, executive director of the Community and Family Services International (CFSI), was impressed with the developments  in Guiuan, an important port serving cities in southeastern region of the Visayas.

“A great deal of progress on debris movement. Very impressive. Heavy equipment in. They were very well organized. The municipality was organized before the disaster. And they built on that level of organization,” said Muncy, whose NGO group is the implementing partner of UN agencies in many projects in the Visayas and rebellion-torn areas in Mindanao.

“When I went there seven days after the typhoon struck, they briefed me on their pretyphoon evacuation process. The predeployment of relief goods, distribution of relief goods even before the typhoon came,” said the American humanitarian worker.

“They had these different volunteers with very specific assignments. They had a very high level of organization before so when the disaster occurred they could move very quickly.”

Here, there is no rest for the weary. Thrice since Yolanda’s assault, three more storms have visited the area, prompting survivors to abandon temporary shelters and patched up homes.

Marilyn Velasco’s house—a three-room affair shared by 13 people in her three extended families at a shantytown called Barangay Hollywood—was

demolished in the November typhoon.

The mother of seven children had been on the run since—first to an evacuation center, and later to a tented encampment on the campus of Eastern Samar State University facing the public cemetery, a constant reminder of her mortality.

“There’s no peace of mind.  We’re always running,” said Velasco, 42, of the three times since Yolanda that her family had to flee, whenever a storm came and she had to fold her tent—twice—to go to the unfinished Napoto hospital. Construction of the building has resumed.

“We don’t know where we would run to next,” she said. “The children are terrified when the wind blows and the tents rock. They are reminded of Yolanda.”

Except now, with the radar dome wrecked, they would probably be blind to the next Pacific catastrophe.

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