BAGUIO CITY – The City Development Council (CDC) adopted a standing policy mandating all the city’s 128 barangays to submit proposals for high impact development project to the city government for funding to prevent unimplemented projects due to lack of funds that affects the performance of the city and its competitiveness in project implementation.
Mayor Mauricio G. Domogan said over the past several years, the city was not able to implement hundreds of millions worth of infrastructure projects that funded by the annual budget because of problems on the target project sites apart from absence of takers of the projects when bid out due to the meagre funding earmarked for the projects.
“We agreed that barangays should submit to the City Development Council for approval high impact development projects to allow the projects to be funded sufficiently and implemented to avoid past projects costing one hundred thousand pesos and below which have not been implemented through the years because there are no takers,” Domogan stressed.
He explained that even if the small projects will be undertaken, the process in their implementation by administration is far more tedious than undergoing the rigid bidding process thereby leaving the projects unimplemented and affecting the city’s overall performance in the implementation of projects were funded under its annual budget.
According to him, the CDC agreed to realign the funding for the small unimplemented projects so that those projects that should be funded will be the ones to be implemented, especially if there will be no problems encountered in the project site, so that overall development in the city’s barangays could be realized.
Further, the CDC approved the shopping list of projects where Rep. Mark Go and the members of the City Council will select projects for funding from the national government and the annual budget of the city next year and that there will no longer be amendments made in the list.
He added the approved shopping list is the product of all the list of priority projects that were submitted to the city by the city’s 128 barangays and other priority projects identified by the various offices of the city and this serves as the list for selecting projects to be funded next year from city budget next year.
The CDC is composed of city officials, barangay officials, representatives from the concerned departments of the local government and representatives from accredited non-government organizations.
Domogan reported starting next year, the local government will implemen high impact development projects not only within government offices but also in the different barangays to allow the areas in the city to be fully developed aside from improving the delivery of basic services in the different barangays. /By Dexter A. See