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MANDAUE CITY, Philippines – The math of Mandaue City Hall's payroll continues to surprise.
A new request to fund the honoraria of 474 Clean and Green “program workers” will meet rough sailing in the City Council, where Vice Mayor Carlo Fortuna said the spending for non-regular employees was reaching historic levels.
“Now it seems bigger than the previous administration's,” he said.
By his calculations, if the budget request is approved for services rendered until the end of 2008, Mandaue City would be spending P129 million this year for all temporary workers.
The previous administration of former mayor Thadeo Ouano spent about P113 million in 2007.
The actual number of Mandaue's non-regular employees — classified as job order workers or program employees — has been a thorny issue in budget debates, which were thought to have eased up with the recent agreement of Mayor Jonas Cortes and the vice mayor to grant a P52 daily increase in the honoraria of over 1,700 job order workers assigned in various offices such as the public market, hospital, maintenance crew, slaughterhouse and City Hall.
A new list of 454 Clean and Green program workers submitted on August 28 has caught the opposition-led council by “surprise.”
Clean and Green workers are street sweepers and gardeners assigned in different barangays (villages). They work for about four hours a day. Job order employees, meanwhile, report from 8 a.m. to 5 p.m.
In a letter to Mayor Cortes, the council asked for an inventory or full list of “all the names of all other types, class, and categories of employees wholly or partially paid out of the coffers of the city” to clear up the matter.
The list should include details such as “the compensation level, assigned offices, work assignments, period of engagement, and their supervisors.”
Earlier, Mayor Cortes defended his requests for temporary workers by saying his administration has fewer non-regular employees that his predecessor.
He said the 1,789 “hirees” enabled the city to save P10.8 million compared to the previous administration at 1,819.
The Mandaue City government has a core staff of about 400 regular employees, but the size of its temporary workforce, whose members are hired on 3-month renewable contracts, is bigger.
On August 28, Vice Mayor Fortuna received a separate request from for allocations for 442 Clean and Green program employees. This list was not part of the earlier list of 1,789 presented in the deliberation of Supplemental Budget No. 1, which was recently approved by the City Council.
The vice mayor said there was an “attempt” to exclude the new list to make the size of non-regular employees smaller.
The additional list was signed by Human Resource Management Office (HRMO) chief Eutiquio Sanchez.
If the 442 Clean and Green workers are hired for six months until the end of 2008, the cost of their honoraria could reach P6.27 million, said the vice mayor.
“We expressed surprise over this new listing because it appears they are additional employees of the city assigned to the barangays over and above those who are presently listed in the 1,789 job order employees which includes barangay detailed workers,” Fortuna said after the City Council approved P28 million for salaries last week.
City Administrator Briccio Joseph Boholst said Fortuna was giving a “misleading conclusion” and insisted that “the mayor is not hiding any figures.”
Boholst reminded that in the previous Ouano administration, it was a practice to separate the list of Clean and Green program employees from job order employees.
“And that was what we followed,” he said.
Boholst maintained that even with 442 program employees, the Cortes administration was hiring fewer temporary employees than his predecessor.
Fortuna on Tuesday sent a letter asking for a clarification from the mayor. He said any spending for the 442 Clean and Green workers would have to wait for another supplemental budget, which the council will scrutinize.
“Instead of having a lean bureaucracy with double output, we now have a huge bureaucracy eating more than two-thirds of the budget yet with little output in terms of services,” he complained.
He said this smacks of political accommodation and “is contrary to maximizing cost effectiveness in running the government.”
