Bayombong, Nueva Vizcaya—Eleven Vizcayano mayors are up in arms after being sued by the Ombudsman for not filing their reports on their local Anti-Drug Abuse Councils for the year 2017, ahead of an October 2018 deadline imposed by the Department of the Interior and Local Government.
The mayors said a “system backdown” at the DILG was to blame for the non-submission of their reports online to the department’s central office, which was verified by Assistant Regional Director Elpidio Duruin.
In fact, the mayors said, they had handed their ADAC Means of Verifications to their respective Municipal Local Government Operations Officers before the deadline, as noted in DILG memorandum circular 2018-01 and 2018-159.
The MLGOOs in turn handed the ADAC reports to the provincial focal person, Nueva Vizcaya DILG Provincial Director Elma Urbina, who’s the only person that could open the systems after the deadline on Oct. 26.
Still, the Ombudsman filed cases of dereliction of duty against the mayors of Diadi, Dupax Sur, Dupax Norte, Alfonso Castaneda, Kayapa, Bambang, Aritao and Sta. Fe on March 28.
The mayors of Solano and Bayombong also received letters from the DILG central office asking them to explain why they fell below the 50% level of performance over their respective ADAC’s, which meant their local councils were “low functional organizations” based on the Means of Evaluation criteria set by the DILG and the Dangerous Drugs Board.
Bagabag Mayor Johnny Sevillena, President of the Nueva Vizcaya Chapter of the League of Municipal Mayors in the Philippines, told Manila Standard: “All my colleagues are shocked, including myself. We organize our respective Anti-Drug Abuse Councils. We allocated financial assistances for it. We were “Hands On” during its organizations. We conducted quarterly meeting too.”
“In fact, our reports are intact. We are very hurt that these happened to us,” Sevillena added. “For the record our provincial focal person didn’t conduct consultations with us mayors, or even attend our Liga meetings.”
“As for these ADAC performance evaluations, I could state that everywhere in Vizcaya ADAC’s are functional. Respective barangays are drug cleared, not all though,” the mayor said.
The problem, Sevillena said, arose due to the lack of proper coordination from the MLGOOs and the DILG Provincial Office to the mayors.
“Every one of us in the League of Mayors here have supported the drug war, so why won’t we like that our respective barangays per municipality be declared drug cleared? It’s an accomplishment,” he said.
To accommodate the mayors’ “late” reports, the DILG Regional Office in Cagayan Valley asked the central office to open the systems after a month of extension or until December 5, 2018.
Duruin said the systems “could not accommodate the deluge of reports coming from all over the country per city and municipality to the central office. That’s why these 11 municipalities had their unsubmitted reports due to the closure of the system.”
He said there would be a national conference on April 10 where these reports would be tackled for their merit, adding he hoped the DILG and the mayors could arrive at a win-win solution by conducting a meeting to concerned staff and personnel in the regional office last April 2.
“We asked everyone concerned thru the MLGOO’s to produce the documents that failed to be downloaded to the Google Drive. We are conducting investigation as to why the ADAC performance audit reports was not submitted on time that caused the non-uploading until the system closed,” Duruin said.
The regional office is also determining on what level in the DILG caused the delay, whether from the MLGOOs or provincial level that caused the lapses.
“I also reaffirmed to those mayors that they their performance is not zero as appearing in the Google Drive. They also did their jobs. It’s that the said reports didn’t get uploaded because of some delays in the procedure, which we are investigating,” Duruin said.
