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Tuesday, August 23, 2005
COA report ‘strengthens’ argument v. Sugbuak
The recent report of the Commission on Audit (COA) showing that Cebu is number one among 79 provinces in terms of assets and cash in the bank reinforced the stand of Gov. Gwendolyn Garcia that Cebu should not be divided.
“If we are number one and we are leading the rest of them, maybe we are doing something right. If it ain’t broke, why fix it?” she said.
The paid advertisement of COA published in a national daily last Saturday showed that Cebu has current assets of more than P1.2 billion as of December 2004. In terms of cash in bank, Cebu has more than P1 billion.
Cebu Archbishop Ricardo Cardinal Vidal shares the governor’s view on keeping Cebu intact.
No meeting with the proponents will convince him to agree to the splitting of Cebu into four provinces because he loves Cebu as a whole, he said.
“I will never change my mind,” Vidal said in an interview last Sunday.
Rep. Simeon Kintanar (2nd district) has asked for an audience with the cardinal to explain his proposal to create Cebu del Sur, as well as the separate bills of his colleagues, Antonio Yapha Jr. (3rd district) for Occidental Cebu and Clavel Martinez (4th district) for Cebu del Norte.
Vidal said the meeting is long overdue, but the legislators “have not appeared until now.”
The governor will be attending tomorrow a meeting in Manila of the technical working group that the House committee on local government created to look in the split-Cebu bills.
Garcia wants to point out to the committee that the bills violate the Local Government Code because the remaining province will fall short of the minimum requirement in terms of land area.
The bills, she said, also failed to comply with the requirement that a petition from the towns must be filed for the creation of a province.
The cardinal is also wondering why the public hearing on the proposal was held in Manila when the “public” are the Cebuanos.
Vidal is set to issue this week a pastoral letter on the findings of the survey the Cebu Archdiocese conducted among parishes on the Sugbuak issue.
“I have tried to survey the feelings of my faithful on Sugbuak. I have not included a survey for other religions because we have conducted this survey for the Catholic faithful,” the cardinal said.
For its part, the Provincial Board (PB) is not joining the clamor for a public hearing here in Cebu on the bills.
Objections from his colleagues prodded Board Member Victor Maambong to withdraw his proposed resolution requesting House committee on local government chairman Emilio Macias to hold a public hearing in Cebu.
Maambong, in withdrawing the move, said he will just stick to the agreement during the pre-session caucus that his stand will not be made an official act of the PB because it “will cause disagreement” among them again.
The board earlier approved a resolution that tends to support the move to split Cebu. The resolution, however, did not come without much debate, as board members almost had a tie when they voted on the issue.
As for yesterday’s resolution, PB Members Antonio Almirante pointed out that the House committee already made a categorical statement that its job will only be “purely documentary” in nature.
“I feel that this proposed resolution is a futile gesture...and the people should charter their own destiny through a one-man one-vote democratic process in the plebiscite,” said Almirante.
PB Member Jose Ma. Gastardo joined in, believing that it “would be for the best interest that all discussions” on the merits of the issue will be made “after the bills have passed into law.”
To this, Maambong had to ask, “When do you establish the wisdom of the law? Of course not after its passage but prior... It’s only commonsensical that the people affected, who are here, should be heard.”
Gastardo, in explaining his stand, cited Article 9, Paragraph B of the Local Government Code: “Upon the effectivity of the law creating a new province, the Commission on Elections shall conduct a plebiscite.”
The same provision also states that the poll body conduct an “intensive information campaign” on the issue and may seek the assistance of local government units, the media and other interested parties.”
“So the best avenue for the pros and cons is the days prior to the plebiscite.
Right now, the concern of the House committee on local government is really whether the bills have complied with the requirements on income, population and land area,” said Gastardo. (MBG/LLV/JPM)
(August 23, 2005 issue)
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