Tinamban

I was alarmed by the reported findings made by government auditors that Cebu City incurred a deficit of over half a billion pesos in the year 2012. However matter-of-factly was the news parlayed to the media, it was still horrifying for observers, like me, who are possessed with no technical knowledge of the subject. In my book, a deficit is a deficit and if it runs into hundreds of millions of pesos, it risks a local government unit's delivery of essential services.

At a much later time though, I learned from a friend who works at city hall that the Cebu City administration of His Honor, Mayor Michael L. Rama, corrected the figures. The mayor's office claimed that the wrong data stemmed from a flawed system used by the auditors. In other words, the city, in 2012, was not in the red. Contrary to the audit report, our city was financially robust. Unfortunately, only few people were able to read the rejoinder issued by the city administration and so what remained in the minds of those who did not see the issues joined was the precarious financial situation of the city.

With the information relayed me by my city hall connection, albeit lately, and given my limitation on the subject, I do not want to write about topic in the highly technical and complex context that it already is. True to the off-tangent nature of this column, I look at the matter in an entirely different, hopefully explicable, perspective.

We read of the reports that about 2,500 city hall workers might be affected by the city's on-going reorganization efforts. This is the alleged number of personnel who openly worked for the political opponents of the sitting administration. To the supporters of the mayor, in and out of government service, those workers need not wait to be terminated. They should volunteer to quit working.

If that report of dismissible two thousand plus city government employees, of the Type O brand, is anchored on facts, the present administration does not have to rectify the allegedly erroneous COA findings. All it needs to do is expedite the termination of these workers, not for political reason, because that is not democratic, but for fiscal consideration.

Let us do it the “tinamban” way. Removing the 2,500 workers from city hall will surely affect work efficiency. It cannot be done without harmful consequence. Administrators have to concede that there are good and productive workers among this number such that to terminate them will hamper, at the very least, the flow of papers that accompany all services. More realistically, giving 2,500 workers their walking papers will reduce the number of warm bodies needed by government to do what is necessary to maximize public service.

Clearly then, the mayor has a formidable task at hand. While he has to rid city hall of people who do not believe in his leadership, he, in the name of public service, is forced by circumstance to retain as city hall personnel some of the reported Type O supporters. The operative word is “some”. This means that he has to release a much greater number. Arbitrarily speaking, he may keep 500 such workers and let go 2,000.

To make sure that city hall has the manpower capacity to effect a continued delivery of basic services and at the same time accommodate some of its political supporters, something it cannot avoid, the city government can employ 500 of Team Rama May 2013 poll supporters. The resulting configuration of this interplay of termination and hiring of personnel will clear the city hall of about 1,500 personnel from its payroll. Now, if the average monthly take home pay of city hall rank and filers is eight thousand pesos, we are talking here of twelve million peso monthly savings or roughly P144 million for the year.

I posit that the mayor can justify this. His administration has been strangled by a city council dominated by his political opponents. For instance, the budget that the mayor's office submitted to the sanggunian last year was atrociously waylaid. We expect the same adversarial stance by the city council and in that scenario, his fund source will suffer. Let this happenstance explain his refusal to keep old city hall workers.

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