A notarized administrative complaint will be filed by Sunday PUNCH Publisher Ermin Garcia Jr. before the Office of President and the Department of the Interior and Local Government against Councilor Redford P. Erfe-Mejia for grave abuse of authority and misconduct when he ordered the Sangguniang Panlungsod Secretary to ban Leonardo Micua, Sunday PUNCH managing editor from joining the virtual hearings of the SP Committee on Finance twice.

Attached in his complaint, a copy of which was forwarded to the DILG Dagupan office last Friday, January 6, was a letter of SP Secretary Ravanzo to Garcia dated December 16, 2022 in response to the latter’s letter of inquiry on the same date admitting the exclusion of the writer from the committee hearing was on the orders of Councilor Erfe -Mejia.

In his complaint, Garcia said he was charging Councilor Erfe-Mejia of “grave abuse of authority and grave misconduct as shown in his discriminatory practice and in his violations of RA 7160 (Local Government Code).

In support of his charges, Garcia said The Sunday PUNCH has been reporting and discussing the discovered anomalies of the past city government whose officials are known allies of the majority members of the present Dagupan’s Sanggunian. (Attached in the complaint are several issues of The Sunday Punch and Garcia’s column in his paper, “Punchline”)

He cited The PUNCH’s series of reports on the majority members’ undue and whimsical delay in enacting Supplemental Budget (to support the scholar of the past and present administration), the rehabilitation of damaged school buildings, improvement of public health services), Supplemental Annual Investment Program for 2022 (to support programs of the national government filed last October 2022) and the Annual 2023 budget as certified urgent by the City Mayor all calling attention to the majority members’ willful refusal to perform their mandated duties).

Garcia stated that the majority members, in an unprecedented move, referred the two supplemental funding measures and, the 2023 annual budget certified as urgent by Mayor Belen Fernandez to the committee for public hearings instead of facilitating their approval based on cited merits.

It was these hearings on December 6 and 14, 2022 that Councilor Erfe-Mejia ordered the SP secretary to ban Micua, who was covering the public hearings in his capacity as managing editor, from virtual hearings of the Committee on Finance chaired by Erfe-Mejia.

In ordering such ban, “there was no prior notice nor subsequent explanation from the committee nor the SP explaining the sudden and outright exclusion of Sunday Punch’s managing editor, Mr. Micua, on those dates,” the complaint of Garcia stated.

According to Garcia, the undue prohibition of Erfe-Mejia against Micua in the virtual hearings is a violation of the citizen’s constitutional right to information and the freedom of the press. He said Erfe-Mejia prevented The PUNCH to perform its journalistic task to keep the public informed of official acts of the city’s elected officials that affect them.

Further, according to the complaint, Councilor Erfe-Mejia must explain why the prohibition applied only to Micua when there were other media practitioners in the city covering activities of the Sanggunian. According to Garcia, Councilor Erfe-Mejia’s order to ban only Micua was discriminatory. (News Desk)

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