Electing education champions

The midterm elections are just around the corner and voters are likely to be finalizing their list of candidates.

Midterm elections are often viewed as less important than the national elections held every six years because we are not electing the main decision maker — the President.

While this is reasonable, the midterm election results have a more direct impact on voters. And this is why every voter needs to be more purposeful and personal about their selection.

Taking an economist’s perspective, there is an incentive for increased political activity at the local government unit (LGU) level.

The Mandanas-Garcia ruling in 2019 expanded the internal revenue allocation (IRA) of LGUs to 40 percent of all national taxes.

In other words, the share of the revenue pie got bigger for city and provincial managers. How it works though is that the allocation is computed from taxes collected in the third fiscal year preceding the current budget year, which means the budget is a look-back computation.

If you noticed your LGU has not been spending much recently, it is likely because the effects of smaller tax revenues during Covid-19 are still reflected in LGU budgets.

As the negative effect of Covid on tax revenues (and LGU IRA) starts to fade or wear off over the next couple of years, this would mean more money for provinces, cities, municipalities and barangays. Incoming LGU administrators should be more motivated by the bigger budget in providing public service.

As voters, we still need to have a basis for deciding whom to vote for. Like investing, there are two styles of LGU administration: tactical and strategic. The tactical style caters to the current and short-term needs of the city or municipality.

While it has drawbacks, this style is about the present. Administrators of this style would be focusing on the high poverty incidence and the growth of slums, which require continued 4Ps support and providing constituents with food or cash, or gifts.

This could also mean ensuring traffic in the main road is just the normal-bad and not escalating to the carmageddon level. This style is about the provision of services that would make daily life in the city tolerable and not miserable.

In contrast, the strategic administrator looks at the LGU relative to the whole country 10 years from now. Not what the city is today but what it can be.

The scope of LGUs includes health, peace and security, and education. This means that LGUs oversee public hospitals, the police, and the schools in their respective jurisdictions.

More importantly, these are the levers by which a strategic administrator can craft the long-term LGU strategy.