Where is your 2/3 votes Vice Mayor Belen?!

Votes-strapped Dagupan  City Vice Mayor Belen Fernandez being interviewed by her "favorite" broadcaster Joseph Bacani

Does the tyranny of the majority of the members of the Sanggunian Panlungsod (City Council) hit a snag?

Last April 4 they should have over rode the selected vetoes of the line items sent to them by  Dagupan City Mayor Benjie S. Lim, but por dios por santo, one of the members of the 2/3 or eight voters, Councilor  Jess Canto, was absent as he was on a purported  business trip.

Thus they satisfied themselves to get the opinion of the head of the Department of Budget & Management in San Fernando, La Union to resolve how the city government operates its budget.

(By the way, the opinion informally told to the dads by Regional DBM head Atty. Janette Abuel is disputable. I’ll deal on that in my future column)

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Why they settle for the DBM’s opinion and not call a special session  to over ride the veto the following day or the following week where Canto would be present?

 Hmmmm, I smell sometin’. I see some crackin’.

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Would it be an enacted 2011 budget of P487 million or would it be the bigger re-enacted budget of 2010 vis-à-vis those line items the mayor vetoed?

I could only speculate the following on the absence of Councilor Canto?

Firstly, he probably has seen the lights from the adverse political partisanships of his vice mayor and apathetic peers who gradually bury the interest of the entire Dagupenos back to the “Stone Age”.

Anak na Lasi, nengneng yu amay Urdaneta City pata-as ng pata-as iyung city budget nila every year. Dyad Dagupan la-os! Dahil paurong ng paurong tayo!;

Secondly, Canto could probably not bear the manifest and patent partiality of the Vice Mayor and the” Seven Tyrants”. Imagine, they approved P3 million budgets for the last year’s Bangus Festival headed by Vice Mayor Fernandez, but gave a zero budget for this year’s Bangus Festival headed by the allies of the Mayor?

This is only one of the many examples of the double standards they practiced. Bad taste in the mouth! Canto probably knows that Dagupenos know the malicious agenda foisted by the SP to them;

Thirdly, Canto has been offered probably with some multi-million of pesos of legal projects at his behest (read: Identify them as they boiled to his credits). These could be brownie points for his re-election or his plan to run for the vice mayoralty in 2013;

Fourthly, he was just conscience- stricken about the shenanigans his colleague have been doing since the Lim Administration came into power;

Fifthly, he just wanna be a political saint among the marginalized Dagupenos whose fate are condemned to suffer in the political hell until he “deserted” his colleagues.

God Bless Councilor non-pareil Canto! You’re the greatest gift of God to Dagupan. Halleluiah, baby!

(You can read my previous columns at http://dagupenosnews.blogspot.com/ or  contact me at mata_mario@yahoo.com.ph)