AN OFFICIAL from the Cebu City Transportation Office (CCTO) has expressed concern over the city government’s plan to reduce the number of traffic personnel, saying that this could hamper their daily traffic management operations.
Alfredo Loresto, operations head of the Cebu City Transportation Office (CCTO), revealed to SunStar Cebu on Tuesday, Aug. 15, 2023, that their office is not spared from the plans of Mayor Michael Rama to eject around 6,000 City Hall employees from their posts.
Rama announced during the flag ceremony on Monday, Aug. 14 that he plans to trim down the number of Cebu City Hall employees from 9,000 to 3,000 before his term ends in 2025.
“We would like to endeavor that one year before 2025, there must be only 3,000 employees at the [City Hall] of Cebu City,” Rama said.
According to Henry Tomalabcab, officer-in-charge of the Human Resource and Development Office of Cebu City Hall, as of Monday, there were 1,300 regular employees, 3,300 casual employees, and over 5,000 on job order.
Not enough personnel
Loresto said the city currently has over 500 traffic personnel manning the streets. More than 400 of the traffic enforcers are regular employees, while the rest are job order employees.
The current number of traffic personnel is not enough to manage the traffic in Cebu City as job order employees stay only for a few months, according to Loresto.
Loresto, however, said they are yet to be notified on how many employees will be removed from their office.
He said their office expects that the announcement of the number of employees that will be cut will happen by the end of October.
Loresto revealed that last December, the City already threatened to cut the number of employees in their office.
He said that originally the City wanted only 300 traffic personnel to be retained; however, after some convincing by the affected employees, the mayor did not undertake a retrenchment.
Loresto said if the removal of some personnel does indeed happen, they will implement a new scheme so that they can still manage the city’s traffic.
Loresto said they can focus their attention on the city’s rush hour to minimize traffic jams along major thoroughfares.
CCTO, he said, can also implement a broken-time work schedule, a type of flexible work arrangement where employees work a set number of hours per day or week but the hours are not continuous. This means that employees may have breaks of several hours between their work shifts.