Most provinces miss their potentials for development because they plan programs and operations without consideration of sectoral concerns, the budget, and the plans of the national and municipal governments that they are supposed to complement.

An expert in urban and regional planning said in a recent conference in Quezon City that the low capabilities of provincial planning and development offices (PPDO) result in poor plans that have little impact on local development.

Benjamin Cariño, former dean of the University of the Philippines School of Urban and Regional Planning (SURP), said most of rank and file personnel in PPDOs have little experience in planning.

“Most provincial planning development coordinators appear qualified as far as education and experience are concerned. A major constraint, however, is that majority of PPDO technical personnel lack formal planning expertise, especially among plantilla staff,” he said.

Efficiency and productivity of the PPDO, he said, are also hampered by additional tasks and assignments that are unrelated to its planning mandate.

Most provincial development plans (PDP), Cariño said, have weak impact on local development because the planning process is too technical and the plans have little effect on decisions on the budget. The PDP is a document that outlines the province’s short-term plans and contains the list of program, projects, and activities for the next five to seven years.

“The PDP is thus largely a technical, rather than a policy document, which has virtually no influence on investment and budget decision,” he said, adding that it simply becomes a compliance document instead of being the operational plan of the province.

The Local Government Code requires all local government units (LGUs) to come up with a multi-sectoral development plan to be drafted by its development council and to be approved by the Sanggunian (provincial board, city or municipal councils).

Cariño said that in most cases, it is the Annual Investment Plan (AIP) that becomes the basis for the operational plans of the provinces. The AIP, however, is a just list of priority projects that will be implemented in a year. Projects listed in the AIP are contributed by different local politicians and may not be related to the provincial development plan.

“Using the AIP will shorten the planning horizon to a year,” Cariño said. “AIP is a mixed bag of all unrelated projects that have no clear connections to a more long-term development strategy for the locality.”

Tarlac Board Member Pearl Angeli Pacala said in the conference that some LGUs are forced to use the AIP as reference instead of the PDP or even their own Provincial Medium Term Development Plans (PMTDP) because of the present political setup.

“Plans [in the PDP or PMTDP] are not institutionalized because of our political system…. We change the leadership of the LGUs every three years,” he said.

Thus, long-term development plans approved by past administrations are discarded mid-way in their implementation when new administrations, said Pacada, who is also the president of the Provincial Board Members League of the Philippines.

‘Non-responsive’

Cariño, who made a study on the development plans of the provinces, said he found out that the decline in the usage of the PDP as reference plan may be attributed to its poor quality.

He said that most PDPs are “non-responsive” because they do not have projections, assessments of trends and growth rates, and they fail to identify problems and issues. The PDP’s failure to identify the problems, he added, may result in the implementation of projects that are not responsive to the needs of the citizens.

“A plan is futuristic and assessment of projection is critical,” he said.

Arlene Pascual, provincial planning and development coordinator of Bulacan, said LGUs are constrained in identifying trends and making projections because updated data are unavailable.

She said that some statistics from the National Statistics Office do not have breakdowns at the local levels. “We are derailed in identifying the needs of the LGUs.”

Participation of local officials in the planning process, said Cariño, is also superficial. He said that most officials rarely attend the provincial development council meetings during which the local plans are deliberated upon.  “They just send representatives.”

Section 110 of the Local Government Code states that the local development councils shall meet at least once every six months.

Budget constraints

The implementation of the provincial development plans, Cariño added, is also hampered by budgetary constraints as a result of the mismatch between revenue collected and expenditure needs of the provinces.

“Fiscal gap has given rise to lack of fiscal autonomy and weak accountability,” he said, adding that most LGUs, particularly the provinces, still get 80 percent of their income from their share in national taxes or the Internal Revenue Allotment (IRA).

“This could adversely affect their ability to finance more strategic projects that are critical to local development,” he added.

A 2006 study by the Local Government Development Foundation and the Bureau of Local Government Finance showed that, among LGUs, the provinces are the most dependent on IRA for their funding. The study showed that in 2005, the provinces’ dependency ratio was 85 percent as compared to the cities’ 45 percent.

Weak linkage

Cariño also said that linkages among all the development plans formulated at the different levels of the government are not discernible. He said linkage among national, regional, provincial, and municipal plans is very weak.

In some instances, the development plans of some LGUs are not linked to its comprehensive land use plan (CLUP), he said. The CLUP regulates the land use in all the territories of an LGU.

Moreover, some LGUs still do not have an approved updated CLUP. Data from the Housing and Land Use Regulatory Board (HLURB) as of December 2007 showed that 229 of the 1,610 cities and municipalities do not have an approved CLUP.

HLURB data also showed that 22 provinces still do not have a provincial physical framework plan, the provincial counterpart of the CLUP.

The Code requires LGUs to draft their own land use plan, which will serve as their basis for the future use and allocation of land resources. Absence of land use plans may result in the inappropriate use and conversion of land resources and affect the development plans of the LGUs.

Below is a list of LGU planning documents and their definitions:

Annual Investment Plan (AIP). It is list of priority investment plans and programs that will be implemented by local government units (LGUs) for a year. A copy of the AIP is submitted to the local finance committee for the preparation of the budget.

Comprehensive Land Use Plan (CLUP). It is a policy guide for the regulation of land uses in all the territorial jurisdictions of an LGU. It is the local equivalent of the physical framework plan at the provincial level and is enforced through ordinances. It classifies the land into four policy areas: production, settlement, protection, and infrastructure.

Provincial Development Plan. It is the document that pertains to the provinces’ multi-sectoral short-term plans. It contains a list of corresponding programs, projects, and activities.

Provincial Physical Framework Plan (PPFP). It delineates the desired general physical development of the province by providing development plan and locations for infrastructures. It also identifies the protected and preserved areas, growth and settlement areas. (Source: DILG, Joint Memorandum Circular No. 1 Series of 2007)

(abs-cbnNEWS.com/Newsbreak)

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