Proposed Ordinance Merging OCA, CID up for budgetary review

In its meeting last week, the City Council Committee on Planning, Research, and Innovation and People’s Organization Accreditation, chaired by Councilor Ian Mark Q. Nacaya, referred to the City Local Finance Committee (LFC) for budgetary review, the proposed ordinance that will consolidate and merge the Office of Community Affairs (OCA) and the City Improvement Division (CID), both under the Office of the City Mayor, into one department, to be named the City Community Affairs and Development Department.

This after Mr. Elmer Wabe, Assistant City Budget Officer, manifested that the proposal, though laudable, must be correlated first with the budget call of 2024; otherwise, the same cannot be processed immediately as the budget hearing is now already under process.

While he agrees with Nacaya that the merging of offices is actually about operational efficiency and effectiveness and in line with the principle of optimum utilization of limited resources of the government, Wabe, however, said that the CSC standards must be complied with as there are mandatory (plantilla) positions that have not been placed yet, thus, no other optional positions can be created.

“As part of the LFC, ato lang sa hinay-hinayon ang process, and that is why I was also mentioning about reorganization if there are already things to be considered like redundancy (and) duplication of functions, which is very realistic in the city government,” he further pointed out.

With this, Nacaya requested the representatives from the two offices a copy of the list of proposed new and to be abolished positions and the corresponding allocations for personal services.

“That will be the direction of the committee, and we will tackle andconsider all the proposals, and after we have gathered the new data, we will also invite the other divisions that were identified to form part (of the proposed) department, like the Oro Youth, the Library, and the Scholarship. We will invite them in the next meeting, siguro one to two weeks from now,” Nacaya specified.