Good budget proposal

The procedural pyrotechnics surrounding Cebu City Mayor Michael Rama’s 2012 budget proposal to the City Council need to end so that the public won’t be blinded to the substance of the draft allocations.

All that Rama and his financial team have to do is show city councilors that they can raise at least P11 billion for next year without compromising the city’s coffers.

Meanwhile the City Council should find a way to let the executive speak its financial plan pronto, otherwise the legislators risk going down in history as a bunch of filibusterers.

That said, many items on the proposed budget can only be ascribed to brilliant thinking. The proposal proves that the concept of sustainability, badly needed in this time of great environmental depravity, has finally gained acceptance among members of the city’s bureaucracy.

We do not only refer to the master plans for various city areas and infrastructure like the uplands and the coasts or  drainage and transport system in citing markers of ecological stewardship in Rama’s 2012 budget.

We also refer to projects like the P50-million river restoration with 3-meter easement zones, the P10-million pocket forest, the P30-million sidewalk recovery, the P20-million water catchments construction in the hillylands, the P10-million Cebu City Zoo expansion and rehabilitation, P100-million solid waste management equipment purchase and the P20-million Cogon Ramos park project.

We hope that the city’s executive and legislative departments work in synergy instead of useless and energy-sapping tension to achieve most if not all of these worthwhile plans, starting with making the budget deliberations a venue for collaboration.

Indeed, residents want to see a more livable city in the immediate and faraway future. But they will tolerate neither revenue-raising through the incurring of debt on the part of Mayor Rama and the executive department, nor mere resistance to the executive without the offer of alternative ideas and solutions on the part of the councilors.

As each day passes without a resolution to the budget impasse in City Hall, the public sees more and more the ugliness of immature politicking and feels more and more its hunger for wise statesmanship.

Will the city’s leaders step up, chuck petty conflict and be Solomons, architects who can translate to reality the vision of Cebu City as a part of, not an aberration in the good earth?