Philippine Sports Commission readies 2019 budget

MANILA, Philippines — This early, the Philippine Sports Commission is preparing a master plan that should help the sports agency obtain a bigger budget from the national government in 2019.

“We’re working very hard to augment our budget,” said PSC chairman William Ramirez yesterday.

One way to do it, he said, is to come up with a more comprehensive and strategic way of presenting the budget to Congress.

Ramirez said the PSC, behind a core group composed of executive director Merly Ibay and deputies Atty. Guillermo Iroy and Simeon Rivera, and national training director Mark Velasco, will come up with an integrated budget proposal for 2019.

He said the plan should jive with the national government’s short-term, medium-term and long-term programs under the National Economic and Development Authority (NEDA).

Over the years, the PSC has been receiving an annual budget of no more than P200 million from Congress, also known as the General Appropriations Act (GAA).

The PSC, the government’s funding arm in sports, cannot live with that budget alone, and has to rely on the monthly donations from cash-rich government corporations like the Philippine Amusement and Gaming Corp. (Pagcor), known as the National Sports Development Fund (NSDF).

The money from the GAA is spent for the PSC’s day-to-day operations, the salaries of its officials and employees, and infrastructure.

The NSDF feeds the more than 50 national sports associations (NSAs), the hundreds of athletes and coaches in the national pool, including their allowances and all their training and competition requirements.