City Council approves P4.453B annual budget

CEBU, Philippines - The bulk of the expected expenditures of the city for the year 2011 will be sourced from the General Fund while the remaining amount will be taken from the Special Accounts.

A total of P4,133,558,195.00 will be taken from the General Fund while the P825,817,224.00 will be sourced out from Special Accounts. Forty six percent of the budget or P1.9 billion goes to the General Public Services.

The second highest appropriation is in the miscellaneous or other purposes which gets 14 percent or P585 million. The economic services will get 12 percent or P478 million while the subsidy to special accounts gets a little more than 12 percent or P483.66 million.

Local Development Fund gets 40 percent or P321 million of the P825,817,224 total allocation for Special Funds. Social services get 30 percent or P237.8 million.

During the budget review and deliberation last week, the city council decided to reduce some items in the original budget proposal by realigning to other items they believe need more funding.

The total reduction reached P168,399,999 which was slashed from the office of the city mayor, office of the city administrator, Human Resource and Development Office, General Services Office, City Treasure’s office, Department of Engineering and Public Works and the Departments of Social Welfare and Services.

The budget for the office of the mayor was slashed by P8.5 million particularly the miscellaneous expenses for the league of cities, other maintenance and operating expense, band and chorale group and various Executive-Legislative Agenda projects.

The budget for the General Services Office was also cut by P42 million which came from the lump sum appropriation for the janitorial services, electricity expense and gasoline oil and lubricants.

About P31 million was also slashed from the City Treasure’s Office.

The slashed amount however was realigned to other departments that need more budget for the delivery of frontline services.

The City Health Department however gets P8.7 million more for the purchase of drugs and medicines. The subsidy to barangays was also given additional P20.4 million, P6.2 million was also added to the allocation for the tourism office.

Another P20 million was added to the Local Development Fund.

In a committee report submitted and approved by the committee on budget and finance headed by Councilor Jose Daluz III, all department heads especially those with lump sum appropriations were required by the council to explain their budget to the council.

They were also asked to submit before the year ends a report on the status of the budget given to them this year.

Meanwhile, the city council held an emergency budget hearing and a special session afterwards to pass Supplemental Budget No. 6 amounting to P3.9 million. It was this year’s last supplemental budget to be passed.

The amount was sourced out from the realigned items in the previous supplemental budgets. The amount will go to the city’s calamity fund. (FREEMAN)