By Anna Valmero
PASIG CITY, METRO MANILA— Local chief executives of municipalities, cities and provinces who will provide transparency mechanisms and effective governance will receive part of the P500 million “performance challenge fund” from the Department of Interior and Local Government (DILG).
The performance challenge fund will be awarded to local government units that will follow the full disclosure mechanisms ordered by the agency, said DILG Undersecretary Austere Panadero.
“The incentives are geared to increase the compliance for full disclosure of important documents to their constituents. Since last year, 40 percent of these 1,600 LGUs have complied with the directive of the DILG to post a copy of their bid and budget documents in bulletin boards,” Panadero said. (This is a sample memorandum issued by DILG to executives in Mindanao.)
Posting documents of LGU deals is stipulated in the Local Government Code but there were few complying LGUs until the memorandum from DILG last year, Panadero said.
To avail of the performance challenge fund, municipalities, cities and provinces with effective transparency measures will be awarded P1 million, P3 million and P7 million, respectively, to augment their annual development projects, Panadero said.
Panadero said he hoped local executives would their part to complement the administration’s drive to improve governance by working with their constituents.
The executive added that with the challenge, they are also expecting LGUs to actually send 20 percent of their internal revenue allotments (IRA) for development projects. The development fund is dubbed as the “most abused” of LGU funds.
“We eye fourth to sixth class municipalities to be active in their participation because an additional P1 million in their budget would mean a lot and could be used for additional projects,” Panadero said.
Most lower-income municipalities spend bulk or about 90 percent of their budget for salaries alone, leaving development projects at the backseat.
From one document, LGUs will be required to submit 12 different documents and post them in their bulletin boards, a print daily of national circulation and on the LGU's website. For LGUs without their own website, the documents can be submitted for publication on the DILG website.
Mayor Bentham Dela Cruz of Amlan, a fifth-class municipality in Negros Oriental, was awarded the DILG’s seal of good housekeeping without even knowing about the performance challenge fund. He was commended for his transparency in governance, effective use of resources and abiding by the audit rules.
Dela Cruz said he will use the performance challenge fund to build a technical-vocational-agricultural school, which the local school board identified as a crucial need in Amlan.
This week, DILG, together with World Bank and civil society and nonprofit organizations has started crafting the criteria for benchmarking performance of LGUs to earn the DILG's seal of good housekeeping, which is needed to avail of the fund.
Panadero encouraged civic organizations to publish their own independent monitoring of LGU performance to serve as “checks-and-balance” for DILG's own monitoring report.
World Bank country director Bert Hofman noted that civil society organizations, especially in the Philippines, would be effective partners in spreading good governance practices
Hofman added that the seal of good housekeeping for high-performance LGUs will also lead to “better access” to grants from international funding agencies such as World Bank and Asian Development Bank, among others.
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