Panfilo “Ping” Lacson. INQUIRER FILE PHOTO
MANILA — Why is a rich municipality like Cainta classified as a disadvantaged municipality needing assistance in the proposed P3.35-trillion national budget for 2017?
Sen. Panfilo Lacson asked the question on Tuesday at the start of the plenary deliberations on the 2017 national budget, which the Senate hoped to pass by the end of this week.
Intepellating the budget measure, Lacson pointed out a new item there titled “Assistance to Disadvantaged Municipalities Program,” which he said was actually the scrapped program bottom-up budgeting (BuB) of the previous Aquino administration “under another name.”
The senator said that the new program, with a proposed allocation of P19.43 billion for 2017, covered 1,373 of the 1,489 municipalities in the country — exempting only the 160 municipalities covering the Autonomous Region of Muslim Mindanao, which anyway would have their own funding.
Lacson said almost all of the municipalities in the country were classified as disadvantaged.
He said it seemed that “not one municipality has an advantage over the others” in this case.
More puzzling for Lacson was that rich municipalities like Cainta, Rizal — which had an annual income of P970 million– was among those listed in this program. He said the annual income of a province alone was P1 billion in 2015.
“How could you classify as disadvantaged a municipality whose annual income alone averaged an annual income of a province?” Lacson asked Sen. Loren Legarda, chair of the Senate finance committee and main proponent of the budget bill.
Legarda said she would ask the Department of Interior and Local Government during its turn to defend its budget on the floor. But she said the assistance program would be directed at water sanitation and building local access roads and did not include livelihood programs similar to the BuB.
To reporters later, Lacson said there was nothing suspicious about the program but he regarded it to be “stupid” because it classified almost all of the country’s municipalities as “disadvantaged.”
“The difference about the BuB is that not all the areas in the country have assistance. There was a seal of good housekeeping,” he said.
Likewise, Lacson said he spotted a “duplication of funds” because national government agencies were also appropriated funds for the same programs.
“So what for?” he asked. SFM