Neda seeks Ledac meet to lobby for key bills

INQUIRER.net file photo

The Marcos administration will soon convene the Legislative-Executive Development Advisory Council (Ledac) to lobby for its proposed priority pieces of legislation, including a Department of Water Resources they hoped to be established during the current 19th Congress.

After last Friday’s Management Association of the Philippines (MAP) economic briefing, Socioeconomic Planning Secretary Arsenio Balisacan said in an interview that Ledac will meet once Congress—the House of Representatives and the Senate—has chosen its members, and upon President Marcos’ designation of representatives of the private sector and the regional development council.

Balisacan, who heads the state planning agency National Economic and Development Authority (Neda) serving as Ledac’s secretariat, said they already wrote and followed-up with the President and legislators to assemble Ledac.

Urgent problems

The Neda chief said the priority legislation mentioned by Mr. Marcos in his State of the National Address last month should ideally be passed soon by Congress. “Our country’s problems are very urgent, especially as we’re still undergoing the pandemic. It’s in our interest to push these as soon as possible,” he said.

Balisacan told MAP members that Mr. Marcos was pushing for the following priority legislative reforms: national government rightsizing program; budget modernization bill; property valuation reform bill; passive income and financial intermediary taxation act; e-government act; internet transaction act or e-commerce law; government financial institutions unified initiatives to distressed enterprises for economic recovery bill; as well as the establishment of a medical reserve corps, a National Disease Prevention Management Authority and a Virology Institute of the Philippines.

Land use

Also among the Marcos administration’s priority bills are the unified system of separation, retirement and pension; e-governance act; national land use act; national defense act; mandatory reserve officers’ training corps and national service training program; an enabling law for the natural gas industry; amendments to the Electric Power Industry Reform Act; amendments to the Build-Operate-Transfer Law; and establishment of a Department of Water Resources, Balisacan said.

Balisacan noted that the Philippines remained vulnerable to water problems. “We are surrounded by water—it’s the irony of it—but we have droughts, problems with freshwater supply, irrigation and flooding. That only tells you how critical that [a Department of Water Resources] is.”

“There are so many institutions and agencies created overtime to address these issues, but the current setup is just so complex and so inefficient,” Balisacan said.

The Neda chief assured the public that a Department of Water Resources would not end up as another unnecessary bureaucratic layer, given that the proposal had been well-studied and even recommended by the National Academy of Science and Technology. “It’s one of these agencies that, for me, I’ve seen as so crucial.” INQ