Change has come in city hall

Churchill Aguilar

IT’S been awhile now since I last wrote on this column. The main reason why I shun myself from expressing my take on local issues was because I had a consultancy contract with the city to help reorganize the bureaucracy by putting in place a management tool prescribed by the Civil Service Commission–the SPMS.

To my thought, anything I would write will surely be perceived as too biased favoring the present administration considering I was in the payroll. Thus I put this column on hold until I pre-terminated my contract last week since my part was already done. You see, I always put premium on my credibility as a writer more than anything. After all, I am only as good as how trustworthy my words are.

Now that I am no longer connected with the City Hall, I can now very well write about my experience with them without having to divulge privilege information.

Let me start with a sincere commendation to Mayor Oca. You see, very few politicians have the balls to rock the boat once they are in office. Politicians always find themselves in a dilemma of playing around the system over and above overhauling it to make things happen otherwise they might be spending their whole term dealing with adverse resistance from the employees who have been there since God knows when. Well, not Oca. He clearly recognized the elephant in the room and decided to do something about it. He saw that the system was not working to its maximum potential and so it needs to be disturbed and disturbance needs to be major. Thus, my entry and so with other consultants who troubleshoot one problem at a time and at one office after another.

I was not really able to handle all departments of City Hall as my schedules didn’t allow but my engagement with those that I handled were very enriching as I enabled division chiefs as well as the rank and file to formulate their performance targets and success indicators. Contrary to what was expected, there was an overwhelming positive acceptance and support from the employees as regards the restructuring of the bureaucracy.

Everyone was excited to articulate their deliverables because they themselves want to specifically know what their roles are in the development of the city. I would receive countless of requests from middle managers for special sessions with smaller groups to help them clarify their major final outputs but I was already spreading myself too thinly as I was also handling other cities and municipalities in Visayas and Mindanao.

The point being is that all the employees (even those whose loyalty was with the previous administration) were already ripe and ready for the needed change–just the perfect formula for authentic development as opposed to band-aid solutions.

Now that the management system has already taken off, I just hope that it can be sustained with an effective monitoring system as well as an enticing performance reward system so as to gain momentum. After all, genuine change is not really delivered by the elected officials, rather by the thousands of employees who toil everyday to provide Cagay-anons the social services they so badly need.