For decades, we have asked local governments to stand at the front lines of public service.
When the river rises, it is the mayor who must evacuate families. When the health center runs short, it is the municipality that hears the complaint. When a farm-to-market road becomes impassable, when a bridge gives way, when drinking water becomes scarce, Manila can seem very far away.
Responsibility has long been decentralized but resources have not always followed. That is the more useful context in which to examine the controversy surrounding the proposed P58.53-billion Local Government Support Fund for 2027. And what Executive Secretary Ralph Recto is set to do is to prove that the fund can be accessed fairly, monitored properly, and used for projects that communities can actually feel. In this respect, Executive Secretary Recto’s role in translating presidential direction into an operational system is crucial.
The Philippines has more than 1,700 local government units and over 42,000 barangays. Yet the words ‘local government’ conceal enormous differences. A prosperous city with office towers, shopping centers, subdivisions and a large tax base possesses revenue-generating capacity that a fourth- or fifth-class municipality simply does not have.
A remote agricultural town may confront typhoons, damaged roads, inadequate water systems and distant health facilities while drawing revenue from an economy barely large enough to support them. Thus,the unfinished business of Philippine decentralization under the Local Government Code is to recognize the entitlement of local governments to a share in national revenues as per the Mandanas-Garcia ruling.
That is where a Local Government Support Fund can perform an important function. Not as political largesse. As equalization. The distinction matters. The expanded LGSF launched earlier this year was built around the proposition that local governments are closest to the problems of their communities. The proposed 2027 allocation of P58.53 billion would continue support for local infrastructure and social-development requirements, particularly in areas where regular local resources are insufficient.
The Department of Budget and Management says requests for financial assistance are submitted directly by LGUs through its Ugnayang Bayan Portal and evaluated according to prescribed requirements. DBM also says it deals directly with local chief executives rather than intermediaries.
Those safeguards are important. But in the present atmosphere, the government should go further. If the administration wants to demonstrate that the LGSF is an instrument of development rather than patronage, then sunlight should become part of its architecture. Publish the applications as well as the criteria and the approvals and rejections.
Publish the amount received by every province, city and municipality, the project for which it was requested, the date the money was released, the project’s implementation status and, eventually, what the money produced. Then put the information on a dashboard that any citizen can inspect.
A farmer in Pangasinan should be able to see what his municipality requested. A teacher in Samar should be able to compare what her town received with similarly situated municipalities elsewhere. A journalist should be able to determine whether assistance consistently follows measurable need-or political geography.
That would change the argument. The question would no longer be whether somebody in Manila favored one mayor over another. The numbers themselves could answer it. There is an even larger principle at stake.
Decentralization should not mean transferring responsibilities downward while keeping opportunity concentrated upward. A municipality cannot build a water system with autonomy. It cannot repair a bridge with constitutional language. It cannot equip a health center with a mandate.
Eventually, somebody has to provide the resources. And because the economic geography of the Philippines is profoundly unequal, the national government will sometimes have to place more resources where local capacity is weakest. That is not necessarily patronage. Properly designed, it is what equal citizenship requires.
The child living in an isolated municipality should not inherit poorer public services merely because businesses, tax revenues and infrastructure accumulated somewhere else. Neither should the farmer be condemned to a broken road because his municipality lacks the fiscal muscle of Makati, Cebu or Quezon City.
This is why the debate over the Local Government Support Fund should not end with whether P58.53 billion is too large. The more consequential question is whether every peso can be made traceable from the national treasury to the community it was meant to help. That is what Executive Secretary Ralph Recto aims to do.
Keep the support. Remove the mystery. And perhaps decentralization will finally begin to mean not merely bringing government closer to the people, but bringing opportunity closer as well.