Enrile defends provision on school building funds

Senate President Juan Ponce Enrile defended yesterday a provision in the 2009 budget of the Department of Education, which provided for the concurrence of congressmen before construction projects are started in their respective districts.

Enrile said he does not see anything wrong with such a provision in the budget.

He, however, denied responsibility for the inclusion of the provision because he has relinquished his chairmanship of the finance committee. Enrile said he was not in the bicameral committee when the agreement was reached.

“Because the congressmen would determine where the school buildings will be located, what barangays, what towns. They know the condition of the needs of the districts. I don’t think they will make money out of that,” Enrile said.

Reports said the Senate and House bicameral conference committee on the 2009 budget, co-chaired by Sen. Edgardo Angara and Quirino Rep. Junie Cua, inserted a special provision in the appropriations bill giving congressmen a say in the use of school building funds.

The provision reads: “Provided, that upon concurrence of the Representative of the district concerned, local government units (LGUs) with construction capability may be allowed to undertake the construction of school buildings within their locality.”

Many House members are believed to be meddling in and profiting from school building contracts and other infrastructure projects. The inserted provision will make such intervention official and legal.

Sen. Panfilo Lacson lamented that congressmen hold the millions of pesos in funds for school buildings “hostage.”

Lacson told a media forum that this was one of the many instances of “scheming and scamming” in the budget, whose ratification by the Senate he opposed last Thursday.

“A special provision in the DepEd budget says school buildings need the concurrence of the local congressman. What does the local congressman have to do with building the school? If the local government has the capability, why do you need the congressman’s concurrence?” he said.

With such a provision, Lacson said a subcontractor building a school might need to offer bribes to “intermediaries” to get the approval of the congressman involved.

As a result, he said the resulting structures would become substandard and be easily damaged or destroyed, often in months.

“The national budget is the lifeblood of the country. But unlike human blood that goes through an anatomical process of cleaning and cleansing, the budget process in this country goes through a lot of scheming and scamming,” Lacson said.

Sen. Francis Escudero said he precisely did not vote for the passage of the P1.4-trillion budget to prevent the bloated budget from going into the wrong hands.

Escudero cited the P50-billion economic package that could be used in the coming presidential elections in 2010.

“The P50-billion economic stimulus package is a highly questionable insertion,” Escudero said.

He said the P50 billion might not really be an economic stimulus but a Charter change or election stimulus, whichever the administration chooses.

Escudero added that the President benefits from the realignment of the budget by having a bigger fund for the departments.

Lacson had questioned the speedy ratification of the 2009 budget, where the bicameral conference committee submitted the budget for ratification after only one meeting.

During the first bicameral conference committee meeting, Lacson said they allowed the chairmen of the Senate and House finance committees, Sen. Angara and Rep. Cua, to iron out between themselves the conflicting provisions in the Senate and House versions of the budget.

But he said no notice was given to the bicameral conference committee members for another meeting, with the budget being submitted for ratification only last week.

Officials of the DepEd questioned the provision allowing congressmen to meddle in the construction of school buildings.

DepEd sources said that the provision giving congressmen the power to choose the projects could run against a move by the department to have Congress amend Republic Act 7880, otherwise known as the Roxas Law after its main author, then Capiz congressman and now Sen. Manuel Roxas II, proposed to make the classroom shortage in a certain DepEd region as the basis to determine the allocation of new school buildings to be constructed under the School Building Program (SBP) budget of the DepEd.

“We prefer actual classroom shortage to be the basis in deciding the allocation of new school buildings instead of other considerations,” the DepEd officer said. – With Rainier Allan Ronda