Alvarez: House budget version must prevail over Senate’s

The House of Representatives has primacy over the Senate on the annual national budget, Speaker Pantaleon Alvarez said yesterday.

“Under the Constitution, the budget and tax measures shall emanate exclusively from the House, and the Senate may concur or propose amendments,” Alvarez said.

“In other words, senators may propose changes in the 2018 national budget and it is up to us to accept them or not. It is our version that should prevail,” he added.

That is apparently what is happening in the ongoing House-Senate conference that is trying to reconcile the two chambers’ divergent versions of the proposed outlay for next year.

Davao City Rep. Karlo Nograles, appropriations committee chairman and head of the House panel in the budget conference, reported that conferees have agreed to reduce the Senate-proposed cuts of more than P50 billion in funding for the Department of Public Works and Highways (DPWH) to just P4 billion.

He said the DPWH and the Department of Budget and Management justified the retention of the bulk of the proposed cuts.

“They told us that those cuts, if approved, would affect the administration’s infrastructure program,” Nograles said.

It was Sen. Panfilo Lacson, in his capacity as Senate finance subcommittee chairman in charge of the DPWH budget, who recommended the reductions.

Lacson told reporters the appropriations were intended for infrastructure projects “affected by unresolved rightof-way issues” which, if not resolved soon, will result in the funds not being spent.

This was what happened in the case of billions in unspent DPWH funds in the past, he said.

Lacson said some of his Senate colleagues and several congressmen have complained to him that their infrastructure projects were among those affected by his proposed reductions.

“I thought all along that there were no more pork barrel funds,” he said, adding that among his Senate colleagues who pleaded for restoring the cuts was Cynthia Villar, mother of DPWH Secretary Mark Villar.

Ironically, he said it was Senator Villar who called the attention of the Senate to the unspent infrastructure funds due to unresolved right-ofway issues.

Nograles said the problem with Lacson’s proposal “is we very well know that once you are able to get the settlers to relocate but they don’t see any infrastructure being done, then chances are those settlers will come back.”