'Simpleng buhay'

My column for this week's issue of Vox Bikol.

UPON invitation by DILG Regional Director Blandino Maceda, I made a quick trip to Legazpi last Wednesday to attend a meeting of city and provincial planning officers in the Bicol region in preparation for the rollout and eventual implementation of the JMC.

For those working in the Philippine local government sector, JMC is shorthand for Joint Memorandum Circular No. 1 series of 2007 issued last March 8 that rationalizes planning, investment programming, revenue administration and expenditure management among LGUs – your provinces, cities, municipalities and barangays.

This effort is long overdue. One tidbit of info: before this new policy, Philippine local governments are actually required to produce 22 different plans – from the standard land use and local development plans to sectoral plans for coconut zone development, nutrition, culture and arts, food security, shelter and so on.

This is the product of many agencies working independently of one another, trying to push their own mandates and institutional agenda. It is not too different from the so-called 24 independent republics that comprise the Philippine Senate. Or the fondness of congressmen for “unfunded mandates” -- laws that are nice to hear but costly to implement, as Palawan Rep. Abraham Mitra complained about. But I digress and just reserve the topic for another entry.

Under the new Philippine planning machinery defined under the JMC, these 22 will be reduced to four basic planning documents. These are:

1. The Comprehensive Land Use Plan (CLUP), the policy guide for the regulation of land uses embracing the LGU’s entire territorial jurisdiction. This document, which has a 10 to 15-year timeline, will define local settlements, protected areas, production areas, and infrastructure.

2. The six-year Comprehensive Development Plan (CDP), the multi-sectoral plan to promote the general welfare of the LGU. It will define the sectoral goals, objectives, strategies, programs, projects and legislative measures of the locality.

3. The three-year Executive-Legislative Agenda (ELA), the term-based component of the CDP that coincides with the three-year terms of elected local officials, and

4. The three-year Local Development Investment Plan (LDIP) and its annual iteration, the Annual Investment Plan (AIP). Comprising of prioritized programs, projects and activities (PPAs) programmed for financing, these two documents are the principal instruments that will implement the CDP, the ELA and to some extent, certain aspects of the CLUP, under the new planning system.

Of course, the 15 or so sectors for which separate planning documents used to be prepared will be incorporated in either the CLUP and the CDC, make no mistake about it. But clearly, this new planning regime greatly simplifies the process, and our lives as local staff mandated to coordinate it.

And implementing it is the least of our concerns right now. Why? Because the Naga planning staff has a one-year headstart than most, having carefully studied the June 14, 2005 paper produced by the UP School of Urban and Regional Planning (SURP) that provided the main input in the JMC's crafting. And in our own effort to update local plans, we have adjusted our moves, approaches and strategies accordingly.

The SURP paper (input) and the JMC (output) is a good example of how policy can evolve in the Philippines without Congress getting into the picture. Planning of course is not a sexy (like, say Daya Na aka "Migz" Zubiri's jologs factor), lucrative (like the Commission on Appointments brouhaha) or controversial (like the Human Security Act) topic that will get you in primetime news or in the frontpages of our papers. But just imagine for a second if it did: I would say the outcome would be different, catastrophic even, like the fate suffered by the Cheap Medicines bill.

In the light of the most unproductive Congress in Philippine history, this should easily justify doing away with the legislature altogether. But then there's the urgent need for oversight, especially with an administration whose capacity for wrongdoing is practically boundless -- which is just about the only argument remaining for its continued existence.