EO to cut red tape in issuance of housing permits being readied

President Arroyo has ordered four departments to work overtime to craft an Executive Order that will bring down to 45 the present 188 approval signatures for housing permits.

The team leader of this working group, Housing Secretary Michael Defensor, has billed in advance their output as the document that will slay the "mother of all red tape."

"The President doesn’t merely want an order full of generalities. What she wants is a clear-cut approval process to be followed. And she wants this written in stone, Defensor said.

Helping Defensor, who chairs the Housing and Urban and Development Coordinating Council, in writing the EO are the secretaries of Agriculture, Agrarian Reform and Environment and Natural Resources.

The participation of the three Cabinet members were required after it was found out that the delays in the processing of housing permits were caused by conflicts over land use.

Although the EO will authorize the bypassing of other offices in the processing of housing permits, it would mostly center on exempting lands to be developed for housing from DAR and DA clearances.

Without violating existing agrarian reform laws, the EO will mandate that an application to build houses on lands classified under approved land use plans as urban zones for housing need not to go through DAR.

The same waiver will be granted on applications involving lands not within environmentally-protected areas, for which a DENR clearance is required under existing laws, and irrigated farmalands, which requires DA nod.

"We will cut a lot of red tape by adopting a proactive national land use planning allocation and zoning process, " Defensor said.

The HUDCC said lands zoned as residential under the Comprehensive Land Use Plan of an LGU, and approved by the Housing and Land Use Regulatory Board should be taken outside the ambit of DAR.

"The CLUPs should be used as the ‘bible’ in land use," HUDCC Secretary General Manny de Castro said, "as they prescribe the development pace, direction and strategies for the full use of land resources in a community."

"Together with local zoning ordinances, they serve as the main basis for issuing location clearances and development permits for subdivision," he added.

Once the EO is signed, it will pave the way for the completion and delivery of an estimated 100,000 housing units "within eight months," Defensor said.

"Not only housing units will be freed from bureaucratic bottleneck," he said, "developers will also be freed from the shackles of high interest rates."

Private developer groups are batting for the EO, the HUDCC chief said, "because red tape results in higher costs to them, estimated at 20 percent of investment for every year of delay for 1 1,000-unit housing project."