Punchline
Erratum
By Ermin Garcia Jr.
HERE’S a big time erratum in the PUNCH!
The PUNCH earlier reported that the Dagupan City government was discovered to have paid a local trader in overprice for some basic commodities for the city’s feeding program for malnourished kids last year. Not true.
The truth is the executives at the city hall robbed the city blind not once, not twice but thrice! My mole “Venus” at the city hall came up with two more official receipts both dated October 18, 2010 addressed to the CNO (City Nutrition Office).
One OR with no. 0078 issued by a store owned by a Ms. Helen N. Almonte listed 834 cases of noodles @ P1050 per or P875,700; 550 cases of sardines @ P2,270 per or P1,248,500; and 500 sacks of rice at P2,680 or P1,340,000 for a total of P3,464,200. And what’s the overprice (overpayment) like? Oh just P1,705,934 or roughly 100%! Neat huh?
The other receipt (OR 0325), the second receipt issued by Jurick General Merchandise owned by a Ms. Lynn N. Magno for another anomalous transaction, listed another 11 items, from sardines to rice that totaled P1,755,054. The overpayment of city hall was P652,569 or a measly 38%! But don’t think for a moment that someone finally thought of moderating the group’s greed this time. The fact was the quantities ordered for rice, sardines and noodles were simply far less.
So my apologies to PUNCH readers, all warriors for good governance and BSL’s fans for this delayed correction.
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From where I sit, it certainly looks like Mayor Benjamin Lim, City Administrator and Bids and Awards Committee (BAC) chairman Vladimir Mata, City Budget officer Ildefonso Calimlim, City Accountant Teresita Manaois, City Nutrition Officer Leah Aquino, BAC committee members Virgil Tangco, Eduardo Magno, Atty. Roy Laforteza and Engr. Nestor de Vera; and Executive Assistant Maximo Alexis Tan, will continue to have more sleepless nights ahead as the Office of the Ombudsman mulls its next move.
Curiously, not a single one of the above-named persons has come forward in any local media forum to deny the PUNCH’s and this corner’s allegations about these contemptible transactions made in the name of the city’s poor and malnourished children. Why kaya? I thought at least one would deny being part of the cabal but I guess it’s an “all-for-one, one-for-all” stance for corruption. I desperately prayed I would be proven wrong in our allegations but this prayer has remained unanswered.
So whoever said there’s no money to be made from other people’s poverty and miseries was just born yesterday. Join the Lim administration and you’ll see how it’s done.
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A WELL-DESERVED BUDGET. Now to the serious part of good governance.
In this week’s issue, we reported the passage of the 2011 annual budget by the Dagupan Sanggunian last week. The final score is P487.1 million out of a possible P568 million as proposed by the Lim administration.
For the first time in the city’s history (I could be wrong though), a city council diligently and meticulously did its job to the best of its ability under the difficult circumstances created by the city hall led by City Administrator Vlad Mata. It passed an annual budget premised on absent, scant and misleading information made available to it by malefactors in the city hall.
The city was witness to the bizarre tactics employed by the city hall to get what it wanted while painstakingly covering up the tracks that would lead to the planned plunder of the city’s coffers.
Mayor Benjie played his hand craftily, bandying the feeding program for the city’s malnourished children as the casus belli to pressure the city council to adopt the proposed gargantuan P568 million annual budget “without looking” within weeks of its submission of the proposed budget to the city council. He flayed at the city council each week that passed since January 1 for taking its time in debating the budget even as he ordered his department heads not to attend budget deliberations.
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When Mayor Benjie realized finally that unless and until the department heads showed up for the budget deliberations, he could not reasonably get his budget passed, he finally allowed a few to go through the motion with the councilors.
As the deliberations proceeded, it became evident why Mr. Lim kept the departments at bay. The budget had unexplained items reflected by series of discrepancies that pointed to a cover-up for a premeditated plunder. In brief, the department heads knew nothing about their budgets because it was the handiwork of a few trusted conspirators in the city hall. Suspicions were confirmed when the select city hall team simply refused to give the councilors individual copies of their amended budgets along the way and instead…read this…decided to present the revised budget each time on oversized tarpaulins as basis for discussion. Absent any suspicion that the city hall is desperately trying to do an elaborate cover-up, one would have thought that the city hall has not seen technology at its best by resorting to a Jurassic form of presentation. I am convinced that the tarp presentation was deliberately done to provide the alibi that no digital or hard copies could be provided the pesky and nosey councilors lest the whole sordid plot is exposed. Tricky but not smart.
Crunch time came when an innocent question about purchases for the feeding program and management of the calamity fund were raised. The vague answers were promptly followed by the city hall’s renewed gag strategy to try to reseal the lid of the can that contained the worms. With the pullout of the department heads, the city councilors were again left groping in the dark while the pressure on the city council to approve the budget as proposed intensified.
Without any chance to validate the information from the department heads on how and where they intend to spend their proposed budget, the city councilors prudently set aside their budgets for unexplained activities. I can’t blame the councilors for doing so not after they learned how the city hall executives conspired to pay grossly overpriced basic commodities on the Lim administration’s showcased feeding program.
Note: The Lim administration’s penchant for trapo politics was also discovered when the mayor’s office decided to convert the P100,000 financial assistance for each barangay as part of the mayor’s “development fund”. It means, the mayor not the barangays, would have the final say on how the money would be used. Translation: To buy overpriced goods and equipment for the barangays just as Mayor Benjie did for the feeding program. Additionally, the distribution would also depend on whether the barangay kapitan is a political ally or not. (The same modus operandi was adopted for the illegal release of the calamity fund where only his favorite allies were handed “calamity funds”). The city council, recognizing the need of the barangays for the fund assistance had no choice but to approve the mayor’s P52 million pork barrel with their fingers crossed hoping that the mayor would distribute the funds as intended minus anomalous interventions and political considerations. It’d be interesting to see how the city hall will eventually report on this next year during the budget deliberation of the proposed budget for 2012.
In sum, the city hall got a budget that it richly deserved owing to its abject refusal to be transparent and accountable to the people. The departments and offices that suffered serious cuts only have their department heads to blame for refusing to present themselves to the city council as accountable officers.
Will the city suffer a loss with the big unprecedented cut in the annual budget? It could to some extent and the mayor has to take responsibility for it because he refused to account for his official acts.
Is it any wonder that only Councilor Brian, the mayor’s political heir, is loudly protesting the reduced budget with crocodile tears and yet remains ominously quiet and refutes nothing about the legitimate issues raised during budget deliberations? Pathetic, this young man.
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