Wednesday, October 01, 2008 Cuenco starts work on split plan
REP. Antonio Cuenco (Cebu City, south) last night filed his bill that seeks to split Guadalupe and create a new barangay, Banawa Englis.
He said he failed to do so Monday afternoon because the bill still lacked an explanatory note.
He, however, told Sun.Star Cebu that he still prefers for the City Council to reenact a measure allocating funds for the holding of a plebiscite, which takes such a short time compared to waiting for the approval of his bill.
He said that Vice Mayor Michael Rama and the City Council must convince Mayor Tomas Osmeña for the executive department to make the proposal.
“This will never push through if Tommy won’t agree. What the council needs to do is to convince the mayor not to inject politics into this move. Kung pinaagi sa council, sila ang bida ana. I never wanted the credit in the first place, I wanted to help,” the congressman said.
He said holding a plebiscite through national legislation would take several months, as the bill will go through Congress and then the Senate before it is sent to President Arroyo for her signature.
He said that after the filing, the bill will be calendared for their session this Monday, where it will be referred to the committee on local government.
He is hoping that the committee could come up with a report before Congress goes on recess on Oct. 10.
Cuenco said he will follow the bill up with the committee, which he needs to convince that a public hearing is no longer needed since the creation of the new barangay has already been approved after the enactment of City Ordinance 1661 on Dec. 18, 1996.
An ordinance only gets approved after it has been subjected to a public hearing, where stakeholders are consulted and made to air their views.
Cuenco said the committee will then make a report before the plenary for a debate, which he expects would not happen to the bill.
Once approved by Congress, he said, the bill will be forwarded to the Senate, which will subject it to the same process as that in the House of Representatives before being jointly approved and sent to Malacañang for the President’s signature.
He said he did not file the bill Monday afternoon, which he announced last weekend, because it lacked an explanatory note, where he stated that Guadalupe is the biggest barangay in Cebu City, if not in the whole Visayas.
The barangay, he said, has around 50,000 inhabitants, 40 percent (20,000) of whom are from Banawa and Englis, which aim to form a new barangay.
Cuenco said he hopes colleagues to see that Guadalupe failed to give equal service, particularly to the Banawa and Englis area, and that the barangay is even bigger in terms of land area than some Cebu municipalities. (RHM)
