Issue is Senate profligacy, not its presidency

Laymen who publicly slam court actions can get jailed for contempt. Not clergymen, it seems, like Baguio City Catholic Bishop Carlito Cenzon.

The prelate has been haranguing in the pulpit and on church-run radio against a trial judge. Reason: the judge happened to dismiss three lawsuits that Cenzon and fellows had brought against SM Mall-Baguio.

The cases concern SM’s relocating 182 trees in its compound to give way to a traffic-unclogging car park and urban-greening giant rainwater cistern. “We are shocked at how the court disregarded the opinion of our witnesses,” rants Cenzon, one of the witnesses. The judge should have ignored instead the “incompetent” testimony of government ecologists, he says.

Of about a thousand trees in the SM complex, 87 pine and 95 alnus (flowering) trees will be replanted, by consent of the environment bureau and Baguio city hall. Most will be moved to SM’s reforestation projects in Baguio and Cordilleras, where it has sown more than 23,000 of 50,000 intended trees. Forty-two have been moved within the compound. A temporary court injunction halted the earth balling of the rest by UP-Los Baños arborists. The tree doctors have recommended the “sanitation cutting” and replacement of six contagiously diseased pine trees.

As bishop of Baguio, Cenzon oversees the diocese-owned Porta Vaga Mall, down the road from SM. “We hear reechoing God’s instructions ... ‘Fill the earth and subdue it,’” he refutes the judge’s ruling with the Bible. (Only recently he scoffed at laymen who quoted the same passage in arguing for Reproductive Health.)

Deeply religious, the matriarch of the Sy family that runs SM has built in all their malls chapels that teem with devotees on Sundays. Cenzon had barred priests in his diocese from celebrating Mass at SM-Baguio for a year, to make SM atone for the 182 trees to be transferred.

Baguio old-timers are wondering if Cenzon would “punish” his own church for a worse offense. In the ’60s, when he was newly ordained priest, the Catholic-run St. Louis University felled some 3,000 pines in wooded Mount Mary, at the heart of the city. This was to construct the for-profit Hospital of the Sacred Heart. The church never revealed where it brought the logs.

“Climate Change was not a hot issue back then,” a septuagenarian lawyer recounts, “but that doesn’t mean the wholesale tree cutting was correct.”

Now if 128 relocated trees equals one year of no Masses, good Lord, what penance would Cenzon impose for 3,000 axed trees?

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Dramatic was Senate President Juan Ponce Enrile’s declaration of his high post vacant during last Monday’s session. As intense was the swift rejection of his resignation by 11 of the 16 senators present.

Still, people’s eyes are on the ball. The issue is not about the Senate Presidency, but its profligacy.

Enrile’s reason to (almost) step down is the public uproar over his gifting last Christmas of millions of pesos in Senate savings to colleagues. He suspects four constant critics to have leaked it to the press: Senators Miriam Defensor Santiago, Alan Peter Cayetano, Pia Cayetano, and Antonio Trillanes IV. He dared them to muster the needed 12 of 23 total Senate votes to replace him.

 Only two voted Monday for Enrile’s quitting. It mattered a lot for him. But what matters for taxpayers are the two kinds of Christmas gifts he gave away:

 â€¢ First, Enrile converted yearend savings into “additional MOOE (Maintenance and Other Operating Expenses)” for all 23 of them. This came in three tranches: P600,000 in November, then P1.3 million and P318,000 before their long Christmas break.

Where the savings came from was appalling. By Enrile’s admission, most were from excess appropriations because Noynoy Aquino halved his six-year term to become President in 2010. Meaning, the senators continued to fund, for three years in the national budget, a vacant office.

Equally awful is how Enrile says the senators use the additional P2.218 million each. “In accordance with state spending and audit rules,” he alleges, for office rental, utilities, and sundries. But Commission on Audit head Grace Pulido Tan says that senators do not submit official receipts and invoices for goods and services they procure. They give only expense certifications and disbursement vouchers. In effect, the money can be pocketed, guffaws Santiago.

• Second was Enrile’s dole of savings from his office as senator, not as Senate President, as P250,000-“Pamasko” to each of 22 colleagues. He says that the realignment of legislative savings at the discretion of the head has been happening since the time of Manuel Quezon. If so, then legislators deliberately have been padding their budgets in order to have money to divvy up at yearned —  debatably legal but patently immoral.

That’s why people don’t care who the Senate President is. What they care about is that their money be spent for the national good.

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Composer-arranger Tess Salientes performs in the concert “Joyful Journey,” Thursday, Jan. 24, with her Joyful Jazz band. Featuring Charito and Andrew Fernando, at the Manila Polo Club. Cocktails at 6:30 p.m., show time at 8 p.m. Call or text (0918) 9190491, (0917) 5584113.

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Catch Sapol radio show, Saturdays, 8-10 a.m., DWIZ (882-AM).

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