CEBU City’s mayor-of-the-night, Vice Mayor Tomas Osmeña, announced recently that his planned 2026 budget for the Legislative Department is P512 million less than his predecessor’s, former vice mayor Dondon Hontiveros.
His proposal reduces the City Council or Sanggunian Panlungsod (SP) appropriation from P606,644,479 this year to P283,593,970 next year, or by about 53 percent. He took out its Legislative Support Fund, Capital Development Program, and the proposed Archives Building.
He also shrunk the SP Secretariat’s budget from P179,403,714 this year to P48,956,146 in 2026; a whooping 73 percent reduction in allowable spending for the office that supports the law-making function of the City Council.
In fairness, Osmeña also slashed the budget of his own office. From P140,600,790 this year, the VMO will have P81,836,421 in 2026; a 42 percent reduction. Among those not carried over is a P77-million item from the VMO’s 2025 Maintenance and Other Operating Expenditure fund that covers the salaries of contractual workers at the SP.
Osmeña’s proposed Legislative Department budget, though, still needs to be submitted to Cebu City Mayor Nestor Archival, through the Cebu City Planning and Development Office (CPDO), for consolidation with the budget proposals that every department or office in City Hall is required to prepare for its operation next year.
From these departmental proposals, the CPDO formulates the city’s Annual Investment Plan that is then submitted to the Cebu City Development Council for endorsement to the Local Finance Committee for review. The committee drafts the proposed Annual Budget.
The mayor, under the Local Government Code, has full control over the preparation and drafting of the Annual Budget before it gets submitted to the SP – yes, the same body whose budget the mayor of the night intends to gut – for action.
The draft budget will then be referred to the SP Committee on Budget and Finance, presently chaired by City Councilor or SP Member Dave Tumulak, who then holds a series of budget hearings before submitting its findings and recommendations to the plenary.
Chief on the committee’s mind would be whether or not the City’s revenue can satisfy the intended expenditures outlined in the mayor’s budget and whether or not essential services will remain unhampered as the result of unwarranted cuts.
Based on the committee’s findings, the SP, which is currently not dominated by Osmeña’s party-mates, can revise the budget if it deems it necessary, approve their version, and send it back to the mayor for approval or veto. The 2025 budget is a product of this revision process.
SP Member Tumulak has already made a plea for Mayor Archival to submit his budget early so the committee can have ample time for the deliberations. This, in turn, signals the councilor’s, and by extension his committee’s, desire for a thorough proceeding.
Scandals involving kickbacks from overpriced contracts and non-existent or “ghost” projects have left all of us extremely angry and justifiably cynical on the subject of government projects, and the knee-jerk reaction would be to support limits on government spending.
But we need to remember that, as much as it is not a tool to facilitate wastage, a Local Government Unit’s budget is also not a tool to generate savings. We need to realize that any amount of revenue-money an LGU keeps in the bank is an amount of money not invested in services to the public or to improving the local economy.
What good is for the people to have an LGU that has billions in the bank when their streetlamps are busted, local roads potholed, thoroughfares and alleys flooded, essential social services non-existent, and the local economy stagnant?
Yes, there needs to be more scrutiny and oversight on how government in general does its procurement, keener monitoring of how government contractors carry out their projects, and closer evaluation of contractor billings and the government’s payments.
But the mayor-of-the-night’s very act of limiting the resources of the SP and the Secretariat limits that institutional capacity for oversight, monitoring, and evaluation for local projects that we might find questionable.
It hampers the SP’s capacity to hold their hearings, or commission independent technical reviews, or to fund staff-led investigations into flagged projects.
A reduced budget means committees will have fewer staff to prepare ordinances, analyze procurement documents, or produce evidence based reports; thereby slowing the act of lawmaking and degrading the quality of oversight.
It’s a self-inflicted weakening of the legislature’s operational tools and a voluntary, uncoerced, and willful hampering of the city council’s watchdog functions.
Doesn’t the mayor-of-the-night see? Then again, he did say, in his now infamous June 26 interview, that he doesn’t really believe in a legislative.