An ordinance we can be ashamed of!

At the outset, let me express, in advance, my most profound apology to the honorable members of our Cebu City council for this seeming affront on their competence. Believe me, it took me a hard time deciding whether or not to proceed with this composition. I have legal peers there who have my highest respect but with this column, I would hurt their sensibilities. They could feel offended, and if they should harbor ill will, that is a consequence I might just have to contend with.

This article today can, indeed, be a mean and nasty generalization of the kind of legislative output our honorable Cebu City councilors produce. It is mean because I do not plan to coat my language with acceptable euphemism and since I do not conceive of using figures of speech to gloss over what is unworthy of praise, it is bound to be nasty. As you will observe, it will be both blunt and brutal.

Over my extreme hesitation, I still intend it to be so mean and nasty if only to jar our councilors into remembering that they have the bounden duty to do their best in order not to tarnish the image of our city and its residents. The kind of craftsmanship our ordinances are written is supposed to reflect the intellect of our people. In this case of the mediocre ordinance I am talking about, the failure of the council members to apply acceptable concepts of statutory construction or more importantly of legal hermeneutics can be taken to mean that we as a people, are helplessly morons.

To be sure however, I will generalize the kind of ordinances churned out by the city council on the basis of one piece of local legislation which saw print last Thursday in a Cebu paper other than The Freeman. That is why it can be called a sweeping generalization because I take one ordinance authored by one member to stand for the hundreds of such local laws that have been passed and approved by a body of 18 aldermen. While it could be the rare exception rather than the rule, it has seen print for hordes of people to read and behold as to be representative of what our council does.

The publication of the ordinance in a local newspaper was done in compliance of legal requirements to make ordinances valid and effective. The clear ratio legis of the publication requirement is for us to know what we are supposed to be bound by. Necessarily, we have to evaluate the kind of laws to govern us with.

I am talking of Cebu City Ordinance No. 2330, which establishes the rules and regulations for the use of the Plaza Independencia. As a piece of legislation, it is so horribly written that it has become a shameful product of an otherwise distinguished assembly of a premier city. My oh my, the author simply disregards grammar, if she understands it. Almost every sentence in it is full of grammatical errors. This claim is not an exaggeration and if there is anybody who doubts this observation, I shall be willing to sit down with him and prove what I say.  If, for example, our normal concept of a sentence is that it has a subject and a predicate, oh, there are many groups of words in this ordinance that do not approximate this definition because while there may be subjects, there are no predicates and vice versa.

The author is no lawyer but is not an excuse. She should have the courage to accept what she is not and from such acceptance, it would have been easy to solicit help in doing something she is incompetent to do. As an analogy, the author appears to have hastily sent a memorandum to an inconsequential subordinate instead of an ordinance that it is. It is in disarray. Logic is unknown quantity.

Now, what must be done? There are at least three remedies. First, let the city council throw it back to the legislative mill and totally re-write it. Second. To prevent the recurrence of approving a similar badly crafted law, let the council create an office with the sole duty of putting draft ordinances in better craftsmanship. Third. Ngano jud nga nagpatuga-tuga! Maayo pag gibinisaya lang tong ordinansaha. Dili pa tingali mabisto ang pagkaway kamahuan nato sa Iningles.