Gullas: Fight for IRA will be tough

CEBU, Philippines - First district Rep Eduardo Gullas yesterday admitted that it may be impossible for the 16 new cities to get their Internal Revenue Allotment which has been cut since May 2009, but they will still fight for it anyway.

“They may not give it to us, but we will still try,” said Gullas in a press conference in his office at the University of the Visayas yesterday.

Gullas said that next week the mayors and some congressmen of the 16 cities are set to meet with their lawyer Estelito Mendoza to sign the letter request to be submitted to Department of Budget and Management secretary Florencio Abad. In this letter, Gullas said that they will ask for the reinstatement of the affected cities’ share of the national income into city-level and the reimbursement of their IRA that the department has withheld since May 2009.

The DBM reduced the IRA of these cities to about one-third following the Supreme Court’s decision annulling their city laws.

Last June 28 the court reversed its earlier decision and reinstating the cityhood of the 16 local government units.

Following this decision, Ma. Lourdes Perfecto, deputy clerk of court and chief of the Judicial Records Office, as ordered, recorded the said ruling in the court’s Book of Entries of Judgments.

Gullas, who authored the bills converting two Naga and Carcar, bother here in Cebu, into cities, presented the media copies of the said entry which he said ended the cityhood dispute. He said they already have a draft of the letter, but they were just waiting for its release.

These 16 cities are now waiting to see if the DBM will give them the “backpay” of their city-value IRA right away considering that Abad had already announced that its not legally possible for them to release the city-value IRA of these cities because there was no allocation for that this year.  (FREEMAN)