The country’s 1, 488 municipal mayors are pushing for two constitutional reforms in support of President Rodrigo Duterte’s call to amend the Constitution, the Department of the Interior and Local Government (DILG) said on Friday.
In a statement, Interior Undersecretary Jonathan Malaya said members of the League of Municipalities of the Philippines (LMP) had passed a resolution seeking the Charter amendments.
Narvacan, Ilocos Sur Mayor Luis “Chavit” Singson, also the LMP national president, was quoted as saying that the mayors wanted “to institutionalize the so-called Mandanas ruling of the Supreme Court in the Constitution and the lifting of restrictions on foreign investment in industries currently limited to Filipinos.”
The statement did not say when the mayors passed the resolution and when they wanted the Constitution amended.
Source of revenues
Singson, who gave Interior Secretary Eduardo Año the LMP resolution, said that “institutionalizing the Mandanas ruling will be a big help to poor regions.”
Under the Mandanas ruling, the Supreme Court said the source of the internal revenue allotments for local governments include all national taxes and not only those collected by the Bureau of Internal Revenue.
“Every municipality especially the poor ones are short of funds and they will definitely welcome all additional budget especially since this will help their development,” Singson said.
The institutionalization of the Mandanas ruling, he said, would “ensure that regions will have continuous fair share in the taxes collected by the national government.”
‘Beneficial to constituents’
He added that would “put their level of development at par with those of other rich regions like Metro Manila, Southern Tagalog and Central Luzon.”
The LMP resolution proposed the lifting of the constitutional restrictions on foreign investment in “certain industries,” which were not specified in the DILG statement.
According to Singson, the mayors believe that allowing majority ownership by foreign investors of some local companies will be “beneficial to their constituents as long as the lifting of restrictions would continue protection of workers’ rights and the ban on foreign ownership of land.”
Malaya, who is also the DILG spokesperson, said the government welcomed the mayors’ move.
“The municipal mayors are the ones who know the real score in the communities, especially in the areas where millions of Filipinos have wallowed in poverty for a long time,” Malaya said.
‘Necessary corrective measure’
“Their support of this agenda means they recognize it as a necessary corrective measure to achieve the President’s agenda to make our people’s lives better especially now that we need to recover from the impact of COVID-19 on our country’s economy,” he said.
Malaya told the Inquirer in May that constitutional reform was a “core program” of the DILG but that it had to be put on the “backburner together with all other programs of the department not related to COVID-19.”
“We will continue to pursue that after COVID,” he said.