A PHP 50-billion city that cannot do homework

By Francis Allan L. Angelo

In the Most Loyal and Noble City, 168 barangays discover that budgets, like diets, are easier to talk about than actually start

It takes a special kind of talent for a city sitting on more than PHP 50 billion in assessed wealth to act like it cannot afford the one thing that costs nothing but political will: passing a budget on time.

And yet here we are. Out of 180 barangays in the Most Loyal and Noble City, only 12 managed to approve their 2026 budgets by the fourth week of February. Twelve. That is a compliance rate of roughly 7%, which, for context, is lower than the survival rate of baby sea turtles and considerably less inspiring.

The remaining 168 barangays are now operating on reenacted budgets, a bureaucratic phrase that sounds responsible but actually means “we photocopied last year and went home.” Under a reenacted budget, spending is largely frozen to salaries, standing obligations, and whatever counts as keeping the lights on. No new programs. No new projects. No capital outlays. No salary increases. No expanded social services. In short, no governance — just payroll with extra steps.

One might think a city with PHP 50 billion on the books could muster the institutional energy to help its smallest units fill out what is, at its core, a spreadsheet with ambitions. One would be adorably wrong.

The Local Government Code is not ambiguous about this. It says sanggunians should keep meeting, without extra pay, until the budget passes. If the failure drags past 90 days, the previous year’s budget is automatically reenacted, and everyone pretends the system worked. The law even anticipates that officials might drag their feet, which is the legislative equivalent of a parent writing “I know what you did” on the refrigerator.

But the genius of the Noble City’s barangay system is that 93% of its village councils managed to miss the same deadline simultaneously, which is less a coincidence and more a citywide tradition dressed up as incompetence.

Consider the victims. Seniors waiting for local assistance? Wait longer. Families needing small but urgent infrastructure repairs? Patience is a virtue, and so is suffering, apparently. Youth councils that depend on the SK fund — that 10% carved out of the barangay general fund by law — are especially frozen. Out of all the SK councils in the city, only two have approved 2026 budgets. Ninety-four do not even have operative budgets for 2025, a year that, it bears mentioning, is already over. The youth, it seems, are the future — just not this year’s future, or last year’s.

Defenders of the status quo will point out that barangay budgeting is genuinely complex. It requires a six-year master plan, compliance with multiple national mandates, and a working knowledge of fiscal law that would give a practicing attorney a headache. This is all true, and it is also completely beside the point, because complexity is not a defense for a 93% failure rate — it is the reason the city should have been providing relentless technical support all along, instead of whatever it has been doing, which appears to be nothing dressed in a barong.

And speaking of doing nothing productively, let us talk about the study tours. For years, local government units across the country have treated the lakbay aral — the government-funded “learning trip” — as the default answer to every capacity gap. National guidelines have long warned that these trips are expensive and should be discouraged unless clearly justified and no cheaper alternative exists. And yet the trips continue, year after year, to destinations that somehow never include a seminar titled “How to Pass a Budget Before the Deadline.”

It is not unfair to ask what, precisely, was learned on all those excursions if the most elementary act of governance — approving an annual budget so that communities can function — still has not taken root. One begins to suspect the curriculum was heavy on hotel buffets and light on Excel formulas.

The deeper rot, of course, is political. When barangay captains behave less like local executives and more like ward leaders whose primary skill is mobilizing crowds for higher-ranking patrons, the budget process becomes an afterthought. Why fight over line items when your real job is showing up at rallies? Why wrestle with development plans when loyalty, not performance, is the currency that buys another term? The budget, in this ecosystem, is not a governing tool — it is an inconvenience that gets in the way of the real work of patronage maintenance.

The city council has called for an investigation, which is the legislative equivalent of furrowing one’s brow. What would actually help is a public compliance dashboard — one that names which barangays are pending, identifies exactly where each budget is stuck, and makes clear who is responsible for the delay. Pair that with mandatory budget clinics and hands-on technical teams that physically sit with barangay secretaries and treasurers until drafts are finished. Not a webinar. Not a memo. Bodies in chairs, pens on paper, until the work is done.

This matters beyond the Noble City because it is a stress test of Philippine decentralization itself. The Supreme Court’s landmark ruling expanding the local government share of national taxes raised the stakes for local fiscal competence, and no city — least of all one worth PHP 50 billion — can pretend that its smallest governing units can be left to improvise their way through public finance.

A barangay budget is not glamorous. It will never trend on social media or earn anyone a commendation. But it is the closest thing local democracy has to a contract with the people it serves: a written promise that this year, something will be better than last year. Until officials in the Most Loyal and Noble City treat it that way, “lakbay aral” will keep looking like what it has always looked like — a vacation with a lanyard.