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Mayor Bombase |
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Agency phaseout urged; unnecessary, politicized
Tigaon, Camarines Sur- Mayor Elmo L. Bombase this week urged the abolition of the Partido Development Administration to spare the cash-strapped national government from enormous unnecessary operational expenditures that yield very little or no benefits to the people.
Saying that from its inception the PDA has served only as sanctuary for political protégées of Congressman Arnulfo Fuentebella, Mayor Bombase pointed out that PDA is incurring an annual loss of a staggering more than P 100 million mainly for salaries and wages of Fuentebella’s ward leaders. The PDA had been listed in 2002 as among non-performing government agencies in the country that are heavily indebted or perennially in the red. “ Clearly, the PDA is a very big burden to the people and the government whose existence cannot be justified”, Mayor Bombase, who is an engineer and one of the chief development planners of the defunct Bicol River Basin Development Program before he entered politics, said. “If the water system is the reason for its existence, existing personnel of each municipality can separately operate the system without additional salaries or wages”, Mayor Bombase said.
Every municipality in the Third district is indebted by more than P100 million now because of a foreign loan believed to be bloated incurred by the PDA to finance the waterworks system ten years ago. Collectively, the PDA loan has ballooned to over P1billion.
The water system PDA built has served only the barangays in or around the town proper in each of the ten municipalities in the Third District of Camarines Sur leaving remote mountain and coastal barangays without potable water supply. As a result epidemic outbreaks of water-borne diseases have just the same separately occurred especially in the Caramoan Peninsula. In Caramoan, only 8 out of 49 barangays are being served by the PDA water system.
Five months ago some 20 persons died and over a hundred were hospitalized in Caramoan Peninsula because of the outbreak of El Tor due to the absence of potable water supply in barangays far from the town proper.
But every barangay even if not served by the PDA water system will share in paying back the multi-million peso loan PDA incurred, not a single centavo of which neither the municipal or barangay government had seen, this was also pointed out .
Other than its failure to serve its avowed purpose to hasten development of the district, the PDA has become “highly politicized” according to Mayor Bombase. Not only is the PDA clogged with Fuentebella rabid supporters, even the law enacting PDA has been amended to suit Fuentebella’s political agenda.
Republic Act No. 7820 creating PDA in 1994 has been amended by Republic Act 8989 passed in 2000 when Congressman Fuentebella had so much clout under the Estrada Administration. In the amended law, the participation of the provincial government in the PDA was totally removed.
Mayor Bombase pointed out that previously the Provincial Development Planning officer was to sit in the PDA Board of Directors and the Governor of the province was to be furnished its financial reports. All these have been removed obviously because Congressman Fuentebella did not want the provincial government which has been run by his political adversaries, then Gov. Luis R. Villafuerte and now his son, Gov. L-Ray Villafuerte, to know what is going on at PDA.
Mayor Bombase also cited a controversial provision in the PDA law that requires municipal government to have their development plans “passed upon” by the PDA.
This is definitely duplication and overlapping of function because municipal development plans are already being reviewed by the Provincial Development Planning and Evaluation Office and this unnecessary, extraneous role of the agency can never serve as justification for the continuance of the PDA, Bombase said.
With the government aiming to reorganize its structure and limiting agencies to purely functional levels to cut on operational costs, the PDA should be among the first to be dismantled, the soft-spoken but relentless Tigaon executive emphasized.
