SHOULD be the rule for local government units (LGU) in putting forward programs and projects and their corresponding cost estimates, and not based on perceptions, whims, caprices, and political intentions of local politicians and even by the planning officers.
Comprehensive Land Use Plan (CLUP), Comprehensive Development Plan (CDP) and Local Development Investment Plan (LDIP) should be the basis of LGU programs and projects, especially when proposed to national agencies, regional and provincial government bodies, or to the congressional district office.
CLUP sets the LGU spatial utilization plan good for nine years, while CDP defines LGU sectoral and cross-sectoral development agenda for six years, or two terms of the local chief executive, based on the land use and resource plan.
Matching land assignments plan with demands of people and communities is very important in the life of LGUs. Some land use and development planners call this “controlled development” to ensure that the present will consume just enough to leave the next generations also with enough to meet their needs.
But this is on the assumption that the CLUP and CDP-LDIP are all up to date and done without data cheating or manipulation, not done “on google” without validation and extrapolation on the ground as practice by some LGU planning people.
This way, development plan-based programs and projects are realistic expressions of objective conditions and needs of the people.
Unfortunately, a sizable number of LGUs nationwide, and even in Negros, don’t practice or follow this rule. They don’t have updated CLUP and CDP-LDIP in the first place. LDIP or its Annual Investment Plan (AIP) is often a mere list of investment projects drawn from the local politicians’ political agenda.
I just attended the first session of a development planning series for a local congressional district facilitated by the U.P. School of Urban and Regional Planning (UP SURP).
A workshop was given for LGUs to identify major issues and problems they are confronting and their major solutions, either programs and projects or policy enhancement. The workshop is simply called, a problem-solution matrix work.
Most LGUs have identified quite well the perennial or chronic issues and problems like poverty, lack of farm to market roads, low productivity, lack of irrigation, no stable potable water supply, drainage problems, among others, as actual conditions of the area and the people have barely changed for decades. So even the less civic-spirited citizen can also identify the same. Only the callous hearts and perverted minds can’t identify what is wrong in the condition of the people.
Except for some well-drawn, a number of solutions presented were piece meal, palliatives, peripheral, not to mention being repetitive or redundant.
And I have learned that most of these LGUs, as true to majority in Negros Island, don’t have updated CLUP and CDP, and their LDCs are not functional according to the standards of Local Government Code and the several Memorandum Circulars of the DILG.
So how can their solutions be realistic when in the first place they don’t have objective basis for their suggested programs and projects?
How can they pursue such fund-driven palliative programs and projects when they can’t even get out of being IRA dependent?
Ahh, no wonder most LGUs cannot spur inclusive and sustainable economic growth, worse, they can’t still get out of the cane-township system of most LGUs ruled by sugar landed politicians and oligarchs.
But it’s not too late to create reforms and reorient the LGUs, or at least some of them, towards the models of truly and effective functional good governance.
DILG has been doing its best on this and towards such direction. Its attached agency the Local Government Academy is under strong direction to implement various capacity development for local executives to become functional and deliver socio-economic impact.
Not the least, a growing circle of CSOs, NGOs and POs are on the active mode in initiating innovative activities within and outside the formal governance to help enforce the participatory governance in the LGUs.
Well, these are not easy, but still better than nothing.