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Thursday, February 13, 2003
Editorial: Mayor-Council ties
The Cebu City Council at first wailed like a child dispossessed of a toy, a radio commentator said, then it kept quiet like a brat who is sent to a corner for a terrible deed.
Something wrong about the metaphor: right about the wailing but not quite right about the toy. The power of the City Council to review appropriation proposed by the city mayor is serious business, a solemn duty, not a plaything.
Under the system, the city mayor proposes, the City Council appropriates. It’s no infringement on executive power; it’s part of the structure, in which executive decision is balanced with legislative review.
The mayor can’t say it’s his sole power to decide how to spend the money and where it goes. He shares the power with the City Council that approves the proposed spending.
That, despite the statements of the Department of Budget and Management and the Commission on Audit and the rooting from the two Osmeña senators that the mayor did no wrong.
It may be noted that when Mayor Tomas Osmeña insisted he could release, as he did release, the P32 million in barangay aid, he did so under the authority of the City Council that appropriated the lump sum.
It doesn’t mean the mayor from now on can release money without the vote of the City Council. The mayor spent the P32 million alone, deciding by himself how much and where the money went, because the City Council gave him a P32-million check with no condition attached.
The City Council apparently goofed. With all its lawyers, including veterans in legislative work, it skipped the work of setting the terms for the spending.
When the councilors later complained how the mayor could have acted on his own with no blessing from the City Council, the mayor fumed and they, like the children the radio commentator referred to, ran to a corner and cringed in fear.
Are the councilors now red in the face for forgetting basic legislation! They can do their job better next time though. The question is how they will tackle the mayor.
The ideal is for them to give the mayor’s proposals intensive scrutiny and set up controls to protect the city’s assets, in other words to do its job under the check-and-balance system. That’s unlikely, unless they want to risk a gridlock, a failure of City Hall programs, and even a breakup of their political party.
The other extreme is for them to be like a rubber stamp, giving a show of reviewing the mayor’s proposal but giving him what he wants by imposing no conditions or giving only conditions to which he himself agrees.
Somewhere in between is for the City Council to be a moderate critic of the mayor, to raise concern and alert the public when signs of possible abuse or error appear, but without an eyeball-to-eyeball clash.
How will the mayor-City Council relations go? The next few weeks should tell us.
What’s two plus two?
If the councilors of the administration
party, like the job applicant in Anthony de Mello’s “The Song of the Bird,” were asked by the mayor what is two plus two, how would they answer?
They could answer “four”—and please their public, especially if public good depends on the answer.
Or they could answer, “whatever the boss says it is”—and please the mayor, let the public be damned.
(February 13, 2003 issue)
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