The government’s spending program has turned topsy-turvy partly because of the delayed approval of the new national budget. And the delay happens year after year, the latest of which we see in the Pl.4-trillion budget for fiscal year 2009.

In the United States, non-approval of the national budget causes paralysis in government operations.  Salaries of civil servants could not be paid and essential services, from garbage collection to delivery of mail, are temporarily discontinued. In the Philippines, that does not happen because of a constitutional mechanism authorizing the automatic reenactment of the previous year’s budget in case the current year’s budget is still pending in Congress.

But without a new budget, new projects could not be started. There were times when the new budget was approved in April or May, which meant the construction of new roads and seaports and other infrastructure had to be put on hold for four to five months.

Last year, both the House of Representatives and the Senate tried hard to pass national budget according to the legislative schedule. The House approved the budget bill in mid-October and transmitted it to the Senate in mid-November. The Senate passed its version of the money measure in mid-December.  House and Senate leaders thought that they could meet their objective to approve the consolidated appropriations bill before going on a Christmas break. But the bill got stuck at the bicameral conference committee because there were simply so many conflicting provisions in the House and Senate versions that would require several days of meeting to reconcile.

 We could see conscious efforts on the part of the lawmakers to expedite the passage of the budget on time and spare the country from the ill consequences of its non-approval before year-end. But can we say the same thing of the executive branch?

The Constitution provides that the President should submit its program of receipts and expenditures to Congress within 30 days from opening of the regular session of Congress, which falls on the fourth Monday of July every year. In practice, the Arroyo administration transmits the budget measure to the House a month after the start of the regular session, that is, in the last week of August. That gives the House less than three months to work on the national budget.

But if Malacañang and the Budget Department submit the budget bill to the House on the opening day of the regular session, the same day the President delivers her State-of-the-Nation Address, that will give the legislature an extra 30 days to  scrutinize and deliberate on  the voluminous document. That will enable the House to transmit the appropriations measure to the Senate by the middle of October. The Senate will then have sufficient time to conduct budget hearings at committee level and to debate on the bill in plenary session.  Finally, the bicameral panel can have two to three weeks to finalize the measure.

The Arroyo administration had been given this unsolicited advice to advance the submission of the budget bill by well-meaning congressional leaders in the past. This is the most sensible and practical solution to the perennial problem. As a matter of fact, the budget bill was always submitted to Congress on the opening day of the regular session during the Ramos administration.

If the Ramos administration did it without fail, there is no reason why the Arroyo administration couldn’t. Otherwise, there will be no end to the criticism that the reenacted budget is being taken advantage of by the present administration to provide it with more discretionary or pork barrel funds that it can freely dispense to favor seekers.

***

At the rate trees were being cut at the vast Subic Bay Freeport complex to give way to industrial and tourism infrastructure, there were fears that the lush forest there—one of the few remaining in Luzon—was slowly being denuded. Last year, environmentalists flew into a rage over the indiscriminate cutting of trees in the middle of the forest, the construction site of a condominium-type building to house workers of a shipyard project of the South Korean firm, Hanjin Heavy Industries and Equipment Inc. Later, architect and urban planner Felino Palafox raised alarm that about 300 mostly mature trees were in danger of being destroyed to make way for a $120- million hotel-casino project at the Subic central business district funded by another Korean firm, Kyung An Co.

The apprehensions over the “rape of the forest” at the former American naval base and military reservation were allayed when the Environment secretary revoked a 2006 agreement authorizing the Subic Bay Metropolitan Authority to enforce environmental laws within the free port and special economic zone. Atienza arrived at the difficult decision because the SBMA has failed to secure from his department an environmental clearance certificate for the free port since the signing of the agreement. He said the SBMA ignored the right of the Environment Department “to confirm all previously issued clearances and permits for individual business locators” and “failed to provide regular monitoring reports of environmental compliance among the locators, which are mostly foreign investors.”

The environment czar said he was repeatedly assured by SBMA administrator Armand Arreza that not one tree would be felled to build the Grand Utopia casino-hotel, but a team hired by the Korean investor to survey the area reported that at least l6l trees would be cut down allegedly because they were “diseased.”  The SBMA, according to Atienza, was given enough time—in fact four years—to comply with the terms and conditions of the agreement but he said his department kept receiving complaints of violations of environmental laws from many sectors.

With the revocation of the agreement, the department henceforth will take over the enforcement of environmental laws inside the free port and economic zone. “The DENR is accountable to the people for the protection of the environment, and Subic is much too important to the country’s economic development and even the well-being of the people. Because of this, we have decided to take direct control in Subic instead of allowing the SBMA to have sole authority over the implementation of environment laws inside the free port zone,” Atienza explained.

Painful and embarrassing the decision to rescind the agreement may be to the  SBMA officials, the Environment chief was given no choice but to do it to put across a powerful message that the government cannot tolerate any breach or cavalier treatment of environment protection laws that may aggravate the degradation of the forests. The decision came in the midst of the heavy flooding of several urban barangays in Cagayan de Oro City caused by river overflow that the residents blamed on the rampant forest destruction. At about the same time, the Environment Department was swamped with complaints that illegal loggers have resumed their nefarious activity in the protected Sierra Madre mountain range.