The Bill That Was Always Coming

There is a certain kind of government logic that sounds perfectly reasonable until you sit with it long enough. Iloilo City’s Budget Office says a PHP 300 million loan from the Development Bank of the Philippines is the “immediate answer” to the classroom shortage at Iloilo City Community College.

The Budget Office is not wrong, exactly. The mechanics she described — full appropriation before procurement, progressive billing after — are standard. The city’s debt position is defensible. Two loans from 2012, worth a combined PHP 302.6 million, close out by 2027. From a purely financial standpoint, the math is tidy.

But here is the part that deserves more than a committee hearing: criminology students are holding classes in the Diamond Jubilee Hall. That is not an emergency that materialized last week but a slow accumulation of unmet need that someone, somewhere, was supposed to be watching.

ICCC has been growing. The college, established under City Ordinance No. 2004-062, has steadily expanded its program offerings over the years, and enrollment in courses like BS Criminology has grown alongside the national surge in demand for criminology education — a trend traceable partly to the sustained interest in law enforcement careers and partly to the reality that ICCC is one of the few genuinely affordable tertiary options for Ilonggos who cannot afford private tuition.

None of that growth was invisible. Enrollment data exists. Room utilization records exist. Capital outlay planning cycles exist. So the question is not whether PHP 300 million is a lot of money — it obviously is — but why this need was not caught earlier, and built into the city’s medium-term infrastructure pipeline before classrooms ran out.

Borrowing is not inherently bad. Local government units (LGUs) borrow all the time, and the Development Bank of the Philippines’s (DBP) lending to local governments is a well-established mechanism precisely because annual budgets cannot absorb large capital expenditures in a single appropriation.

The Bureau of Local Government Finance has noted that many LGUs remain within their debt service ceilings even after loan availment, and Iloilo City, with its relatively stable revenue base, is not a reckless borrower by profile. The Budget Office’s point about debt headroom opening up in 2027 is legitimate fiscal reasoning.

What is missing is the fuller picture that the public actually needs. The city says it has a Bureau of the Treasury (BOT) clearance confirming repayment capacity — good.

But what are the actual loan terms? What is the interest rate, the tenor, the annual amortization that Iloilo City taxpayers will be servicing?

If the two retiring loans carried combined amortizations of a certain figure annually, and the new PHP 300 million loan carries a comparable or larger annual payment, then the “no change in amortization” framing deserves scrutiny. Residents are being asked to trust the math, thus, they should be shown the math.

The City Council’s role here matters. A committee hearing is process. Scrutiny is something else. Before this loan is contracted, the council should be putting loan term sheets, the full debt service schedule, procurement timelines, construction milestones, and penalty clauses for delay into the public record.

ICCC serves students who largely come from households that depend on public education because private college is not an option. A PHP 300 million infrastructure project built on borrowed money, executed poorly, or delayed by procurement failures, is no mere financial risk — it is a direct harm to the people this college was built to serve.

On that note, the loan plan needs a sharper definition of done. How many classrooms? What is the expected completion date? What happens to students if the project runs over schedule — because infrastructure projects in the Philippines run over schedule with depressing regularity. The Commission on Audit’s annual reports are full of locally funded projects that sat incomplete, overbilled, or underdelivered. Iloilo City may have earned a better reputation than that, but reputation is not a safeguard.

The bigger fix, beyond this loan, is structural. Reactive borrowing for long-delayed needs is a symptom of something the city should take seriously: the absence of a genuine long-term capital investment program that anticipates infrastructure demand instead of waiting for it to become a crisis. ICCC’s expansion was predictable. The next one will be too, if enrollment keeps climbing and no one starts planning now.

The debt, as the budget office put it, is timely. Whether the city’s accountability to students and taxpayers proves equally timely — that part is still being written.