Partisan hide-and-seek

The most effective weapon in local politics is not a fiery speech or a well-funded smear campaign. It could be the lowly calendar.

Right now, in the halls of the Iloilo City Council, the calendar is being weaponized to suffocate the minority. Thirteen proposed ordinances authored by Vice Mayor Julie Grace “Love-Love” Baronda are rotting in legislative purgatory. The majority bloc’s collective excuse is a tired refrain of “where is the draft?” — a flimsy smokescreen for deliberate political gatekeeping.

Let’s check the math: it took Councilor Miguel Treñas 201 days just to send a written request for a copy of a draft. Councilor Sedfrey Cabaluna sat on his hands for 75 days — and only found the urgency to send an official request after Baronda aired her grievances to the media.

Clearly, this has the making of a calculated blockade. When a committee chairperson repeatedly cancels hearings, reschedules without coordination, or simply refuses to calendar a measure, they are not only insulting the proponent, but are abandoning their mandate to govern.

The collateral damage here isn’t Baronda’s political ego but the public.

One of those 13 hijacked measures is a unified 911 emergency hotline. It passed first reading in August 2025. Today, it remains hostage to committee egos. While the council bickers over who gets to hold a piece of paper first, Iloilo City residents are being deprived of a critical public safety upgrade. We are playing partisan hide-and-seek with emergency response systems. Whether setting up this infrastructure costs PHP 5 million or less, the City Council cannot even debate the funding if the committee chairs refuse to unlock the door to the hearing room.

This gridlock didn’t happen by accident. It is the direct, toxic byproduct of the July 9, 2025 resolution that awarded all 32 standing committees to councilors allied with Mayor Raisa Treñas. They stripped the minority — Baronda and Councilor Sheen Marie Mabilog — of any institutional leverage.

When you create a zero-opposition council, you don’t get unity. You get an echo chamber where constructive debate is replaced by brute-force monopoly.

We need a structural fix to this nonsense. The internal rules of the City Council must be amended to break the bottleneck. The council needs a strict, mandatory timeframe — 30 to 45 days — for a committee chair to convene a hearing after a measure passes its first reading. If a chairperson fails to act, the measure should automatically be elevated to the floor.

No more burying bills in desk drawers. If the majority wants to kill an ordinance, they should be forced to do it in the light of day, on the record, with their microphones on.

The draft is there; it always has been. The real question is why a supermajority is so terrified of a minority of two that they won’t even let the public hear what they have to say.