Mayor Mel Sarmiento was in Tacloban last Friday to attend an RDC meeting. He sat down with LSDE's Sarwell Meniano. Among the issues they discussed was on the "unfunded mandates for LGUs".
TACLOBAN CITY — Calbayog City Mayor Mel Senen Sarmiento will push for the revision of “unfunded laws” enacted by Congress in his bid to be a lawmaker representing Samar’s 1st district.
The official said that local chief executives like him are having a hard time complying with some laws passed by Congress due to financial constraints.
“I’m aiming for Congress in the hope that we can be advocates that will put to a stop unfounded mandates that seem to be one problem to many local government units,” said Sarmiento, who is running under the ruling Lakas-Kampi-CMD party.
Among the laws he cited that were approved without corresponding budget were the Solid Waste Management (SWM) Act of 2001 and the Clean Water Act of 2004.
As a result, only few towns and cities have established sanitary landfills, one of the requirements of SWM. “It’s very expensive to do it,” he added.
In the case of Clean Water Act, he said that the national government is pushing for establishment and operation of centralized sewage treatment system.
“The Congress said that they were supposed to do this in 10 years time. In fact the United State of America, which is a rich country, was not able to finance a centralized system,” Sarmiento pointed out.
The three-termer mayor, who is also the chair of Regional Development Council, lamented that lawmakers tend to copy policies from foreign countries without taking into consideration the budgetary requirements to comply with the enacted laws.
“In passing laws, Congress should be looking at the implementation phase whether local government units will be able to implement it or not,” he said.
Sarmiento, who is also the secretary general of the League of Cities of the Philippines, revealed that many mayors have been complaining about some laws enacted by legislators in the national level.
He also vowed to introduce some amendments of the Local Government Code, “with the hope to improve local governance in the country.”
The city mayor claimed that his desire to sustain what he had started in Calbayog prompted him to vie a seat in the House of Representatives.
“Whatever I gained as mayor in the past years, I can share it in a bigger scale in our province and probably guiding some mayors in our district,” Sarmiento stressed.
Other candidates in Samar’s first congressional district are former Rep. Rodolfo Tuazon (Nacionalista Party), and Mario Roño (Nationalist People’s Coalition), the brother of movie director Chito Roño and son of former governor, the late Jose S. Roño. (Sarwell Q. Meniano)
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