If it takes more than one month and a half for the Sangguniang Panlungsod of Tagbilaran to pass a P15-million supplemental budget, how much more if we tackle a P750 million development project?

No matter how Vice Mayor Jose Antonio S. Veloso explains about bureaucratic procedures and requirements, the public perception prevailing is that the city council he leads is now at odds with Mayor Dan Neri Lim.

Although one thing still remains positive with the city vice-mayor. Until today, he still refrains from meeting head-on the verbal attacks of the Mayor Lim although his body language speaks otherwise.

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More than 100 days after the last political exercise but the demarcation line between the administration and opposition blocs in the city council remains blurred.

By political affiliation, we are supposed to be six in the political party of Mayor Lim and four from Vice Mayor Veloso's group. But during the showdown at the start of the new city council, the voting was 7-5. Of the five, we are only sure that the four were City Councilors Edgar Bompat, Oscar Glovasa, Nerio Zamora II and yours truly.

Until today, we are not certain who was the fifth.

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This maybe telegraphic but as we already disclosed in several issues back, we expect to regain the majority in the city council as soon as the two new ex-oficio members representing the Liga ng mga Barangay and the Sangguniang ng mga Kabataan (SK) will assume their seats.

With ten out of 15 punong barangays identified with Mayor Lim's group, we expect that Councilor Betty Torralba's successor will be coming from the mayor's group.

Ditto for the SK representative.

When the administration bloc reaches the minimum required number to regain the majority, we hope to draw the demarcation line by that time unlike the present set-up wherein we are not certain who are our true allies and those who are not.

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The provincial office of the Department of Interior and Local Government (DILG) headed by Provincial Director Rustica Mascarinas has embarked on a series of seminars on effective local legislation among first-termer municipal councilors and vice-mayors.

Not a few councilors wondered why the Philippine Councilors League (PCL) in Bohol is not in the forefront of this undertaking.

As we lecture on parliamentary procedure in these series of seminars, we learned from the DILG personnel that they tried their best to reach out to the PCL for this purpose but their efforts proved futile.

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Finally, we wish to plug our new commentary program starting Dec. 3 right before our original anchorage, Tagbilaran By Nite over station DYRD.

We hope that our radio listeners during our TBN days and our avid readers in this corner will follow us in this new undertaking on the air.

Abangan!

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