Creation of city legal department pushed

TACLOBAN CITY – Mayor Alfred Romualdez of this city has sent a letter and the draft ordinance to the city council for the creation of the City Legal Department.

Councilor Jerry Yaokasin said the letter dated June 5 and signed by the city mayor was given to the members of the city council in their regular session this week, though it was not included in their calendared agenda.

“This was already approved for the first reading and referred to the committee on personnel and maybe next session this will be tackled in the floor,” said Yaokasin, adding that he is supportive to this plan to create a separate office for the city legal office.

“This departmentalization should be done for them to have an autonomous budget so that they can perform their job efficiently rather than having their offices attached with the city mayor’s office,” Yaokasin added.

Based on the draft ordinance, an initial budget of P1 million is to be allocated to the City Legal Department with at least 15 plantilla positions in it.

These personnel includes one legal officer IV, two legal officer III, 2 legal officer II, 2 legal officer I, 2 legal assistant, 1 administrative officer, 1 administrative assistant, 1 record officer, 2 administrative aide IV and 1 stenographic reporter II.

Yaokasin added that since the city government wants to departmentalize the City Legal Office, this should also be done to other offices of the city government having the status of a highly-urbanized city.

He added that based on the information that he heard, said departmentalization of the City Legal Office is one of the conditions set by the legal officer that the city government wants to hire to fill in the position that Attorney Jenny Lyn Polistico-Manibay vacated.

Yaokasin also said that if possible, the city government should hire a city legal officer who is a Taclobanon rather than hiring someone from outside the city who does not know anything about Tacloban.

To recall, in an earlier interview with the City Administrator John Tecson Lim, he said that the city mayor would want for the departmentalization of the city legal office and for its salary grade to be increase, as this was the reason why Manibay had left her post in favor of a more lucrative offer.

However, Yaokasin said he does not believe on the city administrator claim as he suspects that there could be a more to it.(ROEL AMAZONA)

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Posted by lsde on Jun 8 2012. Filed under News. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.