Mayor fumes over P.9-M phone bill

This is one for the Guinness Book of World Records.

Would you believe that a telephone line at the Quezon City Hall was billed a total amount of P896,960.20 for a month period last year?

When Mayor Feliciano Belmonte Jr. learned of this "unconscionable billing," he was so angry that right then and there, he ordered his men to find out why and how this thing happened.

For Belmonte, the city government should get the real value of every centavo it spends. Since he assumed office as mayor of Quezon City on July 2, 2001, Belmonte had imposed belt-tightening measures to keep the city government going.

The city coffers were empty, so to make both ends meet, he had to put nothing more than anything else into the minds of the more than 10,000 City Hall employees the importance of hard work and efficient performance for less cost to the city government.

To complement this, the mayor’s first official act was to implement prudent fiscal management, which includes, among others, the trimming of the city’s workforce, including hundreds of consultants, sparing only frontline service contract employees.

The discovery of the record-setting single line telephone bill was accidental.

Early last year, Mayor Belmonte, as part of his cost-cutting measures to save money for the city government and to make sure that the city funds, not only for current expenses but also for the millions it inherited in previous years, ordered the Administrative Management Office (AMO) to conduct an inventory of the city’s telephone and power usage to find ways how to reduce these bills.

This included checking for illegal connections which is common for city facilities like health centers located in areas where informal settlers can easily tap into its power lines.

The inventory led to the discovery that the city was being billed for electricity for 22,000 streetlights when only about 11,000 were functioning.

The AMO report, submitted less than a month later, then showed that a telephone line — 9246313 – installed at the Task Force Sikap Buhay, which was formerly occupied by the SMILE (Social Mobilization for the Improvement of Life and Environment) of the previous administration, had incurred an outstanding balance of P896,968.20

The record shows the telephone bill covering the period from March 17 to April 16, 2003, was being billed by the Philippine Long Distance Telephone Co. through account number 50243531765.

In another occasion, when he took a week-long official leave this year, he found out upon his return that his telephone bill increased immensely.

After an investigation, it turned out that a night shift security guard of the Office of the Mayor, had been contacting his girlfriend abroad through the International Direct Dialing service, manipulating it with the use of a card.

Now, the mayor said he is mulling the idea of writing Manny Pangilinan, president and chief executive officer of PLDT, to request for the immediate junking of IDD service from all City Hall offices, for good.