If raising false hopes were a crime, city officials would have been convicted twice this year alone.
Late in January, Mayor Michael Rama announced that deserving employees will receive a Charter Day bonus of P50,000 while the rest will get “not less than P20,000.” Well, less happened: the bonus shrank to P15,000 on the date of payment. In fairness to the mayor, he had advised the employees that the bigger amount was subject to the availability of funds. “If funds permit” were the exact words he used.
Last month, Vice Mayor Raymond Garcia told city government employees that their Christmas gift this year would be P35,000, which is almost double the amount that they got last year. But it looks like we’re seeing a redux. The latest chatter in City Hall suggests that the amount is dwindling as Christmas draws near.
Again, Garcia, who was speaking for Rama, said that the amount was conditioned on the city’s having sufficient funds. Fair warning but would it have fairer and more Christian if the announcement in both cases had been made only after they had determined that they have the money?
In fact, they don’t. The money that they have in the bank is so way off their target collection this year that it would be morally wrong if they give themselves a gift of P35,000 each.
They knew or ought to have known it, too. About the same time that they promised the generous gift, the city treasurer announced that with barely two months left of 2023, they were P40 billion plus short of their annual collection target. To better understand the gravity of the shortfall, the collection was only P7,556,320,087.76 versus the 2023 budget of P51,457,715,685.30.
The tragedy is that two city councilors warned their colleagues about it during the 2023 budget deliberation. Shouldn’t we discuss the revised real property tax first, Nestor Archival of Bando Osmeña Pundok Kauswagan (BOPK) asked. After all, he argued, the increased revised real property tax was what would fund the gargantuan budget.
Not so, Barug’s Noel Wenceslao, however, countered. The city was not dependent on the realty tax increase as funding source. All that was needed was improved tax collection, he said.
This drew a rebuke from Archival’s partymate, Mary Ann De Los Santos who pointed to the city’s dismal record in tax collection. In typical Mary Ann fashion, she told her colleagues:
“Are we looking like a clown or stupid here? Let us be truthful to ourselves. Why would we give the people hope on a budget that is unrealistic?”
In the light of what has happened, I can almost see her smirking, “I told you so.”