EDITORIAL - A new congressional district for Cebu

With the Senate approval of a proposed law creating a new 7th district for Cebu, it will only be a matter of time before Cebuanos will be voting for a 10th congressman. Cebu province already has six while Cebu City has two. Lapu-Lapu City has its lone district. Thus, with a seventh district added, a 10th Cebuano Congress member will not be very far off.

The passage of the bill has been hailed across party lines by most politicians in Cebu. And indeed the addition of a new legislative district will address the main problem of underrepresentation bugging the current 2nd district, from which the new one will be carved out. As said by most of those who hailed the development, it is about time.

The appreciation largely stems in large part, however, from the perception that a new legislative district will bring more development to the area in terms of added projects and services. And that is because the Congress in the Philippines has largely evolved in its real meaning, from being a chamber where laws are made to simply being a dispenser of what should essentially have been executive functions.

This is the reason why Congress is one of the most expensive parts of the government to maintain. With nearly 300 members, each with an assured allocation for projects and services (by whatever name you might call it) amounting to at least P70 million per year depending on that member's closeness to the president, plus all the adjunct expenditures necessary to maintain it, Congress does take up a huge chunk of the national budget. And that does not even count the Senate.

Had the Congress been restricted to its purely legislative functions, it would have been a much cheaper chamber to operate. But no member of Congress is likely to vote on that. And so we have what we have. The problem is, this additional district in Cebu will not be the last, whether in Cebu or anywhere else. As populations grow and incomes soar, the requirements to qualify for creation of new districts will forever become easier.

Eventually, we will have more districts than we can practically handle. This has already happened with the creation of new cities. Right now new cities are being frowned upon because they eat into the internal revenue allocation shares that make up for a huge chunk of local government incomes. The more cities there are, the thinner the slices will be from the same pie.

There should be a similar concern for the fate of congressional districts this early. Congressmen should start looking farther down the road as this could similarly happen to the legislature. In the United States, they have limited their districts to 435, with population being the sole determinant for inclusion.

Thus, after every census, there are states that lose districts and some that get new ones. Each state, however, is guaranteed at least one district. Makes sense, doesn't it?