The 2012 work output of the City Council

As far as my limited knowledge of government operations is concerned, there is no standard set by any authority with which to measure the work of any Sanggunian Panlungsod for a given period of time. Correct, there is none that is readily available to ordinary citizens. It would have been a healthy tool for constituents to check on the legislative activities of their favorite councilors.

The Department of the Interior and Local Government could have provided the mechanics for the citizenry to use in gauging how much has any city or municipal council done for, say, a year but it seems that it is a very pesky matter and a possible source of conflict, that the department might have opted to stay away from. Indeed, there is no use playing with fire.

With such absence of a plausible yardstick, all of us who want to know what kind of grade we can give our local legislators are left with our own individual resourcefulness. Really, we can only attempt to evaluate what the honorable members of the Cebu City Sanggunian Panlungsod might have done in 2012, in a most realistic way we can think of. Here is mine.

For starters, let us consider that the basic monthly pay for city councilors is almost P55,000.00. While I am told that the exact figure is P54,088.00 per month, I have rounded it to the nearest five thousand to do away with the decimals.  In 2012 alone, each one of the 18 members of the sanggunian received P660,000.00. If the word million is more attention getting, then each of the Cebu City councilor received, last year, more than half a million pesos. In fine, it is a whooping sum of One Million Nine Hundred Eighty Thousand Pesos for the whole three-year term.

 Then, we have to remember that the city council is composed of 18 members, 8 of them from the north district, another 8 from the south district and 2 from the Association of Barangay Councils and the Sanggunian Kabataan Federation. All of them got a combined budget of P11,880,000.00 in 2012.

The principal work of the city council is legislative in nature. A reading of the Local Government Code will reveal to us the large scope of possible subjects of ordinances. I like to believe that our sanggunian members regularly consult this code in search of areas of concern where they can write ordinances on. At least, there are 19 such subject areas. Legislation on all of them, when combined, will deliver the most optimum kind of public service a councilor can ever dream of.

 Quantification. That is one way to gauge the work of our sanggunian. By quantification, I mean we count the actual number of ordinances produced by the city council. Statistics, I hope, will not lie. It may not be a complete measure but it can tell us whether our aldermen have been active.

Using quantification as an approach to understanding whether our councilors have been diligent in their primary job, how many of us know that our sanggunian passed only a total of 27 ordinances in the entire 2012? That number of production is, to me, an embarrassingly atrocious work output. In percentage term, that is one and a half ordinance per councilor for twelve months!

What happened to the salary of more than half a million pesos? Is an ordinance and a half for the whole year commensurate to the huge sum of money we pay our councilors with?

 Of these 27 ordinances, 4 were budgetary measures and 8 were amendments to existing ordinances. In other words, in 2012, our councilors only took time to pass 15 “new” or “original” ordinances. New or original because they were not covered by previous enactments.

However, if we should review the titles of the 15 “new” or “original” ordinances, we realize that six of them were on such earth shaking topics as: (a) regulating the use of the Plaza Independencia, (b) use of the CSRP Tunnel, (c) transactions and deals on the SRP; (d) a moratorium of an ordinance; (e) requiring lifeguards on commercial swimming pools, and (f) declaring a May Friday as heritage night.

I hope that in 2013, the distinguished members of the city council shall exorcise their inglorious performance with a more sterling output!