By Estanislao Albano, Jr.
Recently, Mayor Ferdinand Tubban encouraged people to come up with ideas which could improve governance and performance of the LGU and lead to better life in the city.
May I offer a couple.
First, composition of a think tank to come up with workable ways to reduce the city’s over dependence on the internal revenue allotment (IRA). With only 5.6 percent of its entire income coming from local sources, Tabuk City is No. 8 in the list of the 20 most IRA-dependent cities in the country. Not a very good reputation to keep. It’s time to get out the list and very quickly too. If we cannot get out of the list altogether, at least we should slide down the ranking.
For many years now, a lot of ideas on how to make Tabukeños pay the right taxes have been playing in my mind. Let’s take the case of the annual tax due on palay trading. According to the estimate of retired City Agriculturist Gilbert Cawis some years back, our Tabuk Valley irrigated farmlands produce a billion pesos worth of palay each cropping which means P2B a year. Let’s say only P1.5B of that actually enters the market, with the rate of 0.5 percent tax due based on the gross imposed by our Revenue Code, some P7.5M should flow into city coffers yearly from our palay industry. That’s not an amount to sneeze at and it will help a lot in the effort to escape from the IRA-dependent list.
Since bulk of our rice production is exported out of the province, one solution to ensure that the bulk of the tax due the LGU is paid by the businessmen is to pass an ordinance requiring all trucks hauling rice from the province to be weighed in a truck scale installed at Agbannawag. To ensure that there will be no evasion, CCTVs should be installed in alternative routes going outside the province.
I also know one way of making grocers declare a more realistic gross income unlike now that most of them declare not more than 10 percent of their gross for the determination of
their obligations to the LGU and get away with it. But I will only reveal the way to do it when the think tank is in place and of course, is interested in the trick.
Second, initiation of a move to finally stop the massacre of whatever remains of our forest in favor of hybrid corn production. For a long time now, the government has been watching helplessly as yellow corn production lands expand to what used to be forested areas of the city including coffee land. Not only has the invasion of yellow corn diminished the little that remain of our forest cover but it also brought other environmental problems like the annihilation of useful flora and erosion due to the usage of weedicides. Of course, the water resources in the affected barangays have also been greatly affected.
Still the short-sighted people in the hybrid corn planting barangays are not conscious or deliberately shut off from their consciousness the environmental perils of sacrificing trees for corn. Both the Department of Environment and Natural Resources (DENR) and the Department of Agriculture (DA) including the agricultural arms of local LGUs claim they are doing their best to warn farmers of the dangers of the practice. They likewise point their fingers to each other when it comes to which agency is to blame for the problem. DENR people accuse DA people of encouraging people to plant hybrid corn but the DA people counter that their advice to farmers is they could plant yellow corn but not to the extent of clearning forested areas for the purpose. For one, Kalinga Provincial Agriculturist Domingo Bakilan told me that the problem will be solved if the DENR just enforces the law on the cutting of trees.
Both sides claim that the problem has been discussed between them many times but what they could not answer is how come the destruction of forests for corn production continues unabated.
Clearly, there should be a more vigorous and decisive action to be undertaken. Methinks that more serious discussion among the DENR, DA and the LGUs concerned should be held at the earliest possible time to come up with a clearcut solution. An agreement defining the roles of all the parties and prescribing sanctions for non-fulfillment should be signed at the end of the meeting. As one of the most affected LGUs, Tabuk City can logically host the summit. It could invite the LGUs of Alfonso Lista in Ifugao, Paracelis and Natonin in Mtn. Province and Pinukpuk in Kalinga, the other corn-fooled localities in the region, as co-initiators of the move to put a stop to the menace.
I would like to be part of this LGU initiative if and when the suggestion is acted upon.**
