What we learned from the last PB session

The last time I was in the Cebu Provincial Board session hall was in 2015, and I didn’t even realize it was the provincial legislature’s session hall. I thought it was just a hearing room, as I was there on special appearance for my senior law office partner in a complaint our client had filed against several municipal councilors from a southwestern town.

My earliest memory of the Cebu Provincial Board dates back to my days as a journalist covering the Capitol beat in the late 1990s. Back then, the legislative session hall was located in the main Capitol building. I remember being impressed by the parliamentary skills of the presiding officer, then Vice Governor Apolonio Abines, as well as by the spacious session hall.

It was during the regular session last Monday, May 26, 2025, when I realized that the room I had mistaken for a mere hearing room was, in fact, the Provincial Board session hall --now housed in a separate legislative building. With a long table placing the presiding officer at the head and the board members seated almost elbow-to-elbow along the sides, what I saw on livestream last Monday was far from the dignified session hall I remembered from my journalism days.

Perhaps that was symbolic inasmuch as the old hall reflected a sense of institutional gravitas and collegial independence, where each member had the space, literally and figuratively, to speak, deliberate, and be heard. Today’s cramped arrangement, by contrast, feels more like a corporate boardroom than a legislative chamber.

That boardroom dullness was broken last Monday, after one of its members had earlier chosen to break ranks. Many may have hoped that Monday’s session would mark the end of the saga surrounding the proposed ?1.2 billion supplemental budget --a measure certified as urgent, calendared for a special session over a week ago that failed to push through for lack of quorum, and expected to be taken up last Monday, but ultimately excluded from the agenda.

It was time to move on, the elections are over, and voters have returned to life's daily rhythms. But what unfolded in the Provincial Board these past two weeks deserves examination --not to belabor the issue, but to draw lessons about the role of fiscalizing in any legislature. For while we want to avoid legislative gridlock, we must also regret the opposite extreme: a chamber reduced to a rubber stamp. What this moment reminds us is that a functioning democracy requires debate, fiscalizing, and plurality, not uniformity disguised as unity.

Monday’s session --covered extensively by local media, perhaps for the first time in years-- gave the impression that Provincial Board Member John Ismael Borgonia was being ganged up on by his colleagues. Borgonia’s statement alleging “bad faith” in the timing and substance of the supplemental budget may have lacked the finesse and rhetorical precision characteristic of veteran political heavyweights of old. In fact, that made him vulnerable to counterpunches from his more seasoned colleagues who put Borgonia on the spot and exposed his youth and relative inexperience in political craft. They thought it was easy to accuse Borgonia of casting his colleagues in a poor light to present himself as the lone principled voice.

That was their mistake. For instance, the Facebook statement posted by Provincial Board Member Victoria “Tata” Corominas-Toribio, apparently in reference to Borgonia’s remarks last week about the supplemental budget, appears on the surface as a clear-eyed explanation of legislative procedure. It is articulate, measured, and seemingly grounded in democratic values. However, a closer look reveals that the statement is rhetorically polished at best, and politically tone-deaf at worst.

Corominas-Toribio emphasized that attendance at a session does not equate to approval. But this assertion rings hollow in a setting where the board has, for years, functioned more as a rubber stamp for the executive department’s agenda than as a deliberative body. Behind the procedural elegance of stating that members “vote according to what our conscience tells us,” it begs the question: When has this conscience resulted in meaningful dissent or scrutiny in the last six years?

Borgonia’s colleagues rose up to defend the institution but ended up exposing its complicity. In a more independent and functional legislature, their invocation of process would be credible. But in a Provincial Board where process has long been reduced to ritual, their defense sounded like a eulogy for what the Provincial Board should have been all along: a forum of ideas.