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Monday, March 03, 2003
Tom sacks Joy as chief of bids body
By Gingging A. Campaña
MAYOR Tomas Osmeña appointed City Administrator Juan Saul Montecillo last week to preside, in his behalf, over meetings of the pre-qualification, bids and awards committee (Pbac).
Osmeña, in the two-line memorandum to Montecillo, in effect replaced City Councilor Jocelyn Pesquera, who has been supervising meetings of the committee when the mayor is out.
Because the memorandum took effect immediately, Pesquera will no longer preside over the Pbac meeting every Tuesday, a development that surprised some members of the City Council.
However, Pesquera will remain a member of the Pbac, as chairperson of the committee on budget and finance in the City Council.
“That (memo) means she cannot preside because it’s really the mayor who is the presiding officer. She only supervises if the mayor had other business to attend to,” South Reclamation Project (SRP) Manager Nigel Paul Villarete told Sun.Star.
This is the second time Pesquera was stripped of her supervisory posts in important committees in the executive department.
The first was last month, when the mayor issued a memorandum to the Personnel Selection Board (PSB) informing Pesquera, whom he had appointed as his representative, and the members that no meeting is to take place without his presence.
Pesquera, in a separate interview, said she presides over Pbac meetings not as a representative of the mayor but as vice chairperson of the committee.
“I haven’t seen the memo. The mayor did not appoint anybody to represent him after Paul resigned. I took over as vice chairperson when the mayor was not around. In my absence, the members will elect among themselves the presiding officer,” she told Sun.Star.
“Juancho (Montecillo) said there is a new law passed eventually merging the members of the local awards committee and that of the Pbac, but I still have to read the law,” she added.
Villarete, who was then the city administrator, has presided over Pbac meetings pertaining to questions on the SRP’s horizontal development.
But he resigned from the Pbac when the SRP bidding was conducted in April 2002.
Opposition Councilor Eugenio Gabuya Jr. said he did not see a memorandum appointing Pesquera to represent the mayor but “most of the time, she supervises the meetings.”
Gabuya is a member of the Pbac, being a senior minority councilor. |
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