By Vanne Elaine Terrazola The Senate will continue tackling the proposed creation of a department for water resources management next year, but Senate President Vicente Sotto III maintained that the lawmakers should first work on right-sizing the government. Senate President Vicente "Tito" Sotto III
(Ali Vicoy / MANILA BULLETIN) Congress is now on a one-month recess for the holidays and will resume on January 20, 2020. Before adjourning last Wednesday, the Senate Committee on Public Services started discussions on the measures seeking the establishment of a single agency to handle all water concerns of the country and the issues hounding the government's water concession agreements. "Ang hirap doon sa dalawang department...'yong department of water at saka yung department of disaster, hindi pa tapos ang committee, pagkatapos sumasabay pa 'yong thinking ng iba sa amin na dapat ayusin muna 'yong right-sizing ng gobyerno bago mag-create ng bagong departamento (What's difficult about the proposed agencies, the department of water and the department of disaster, is that they are still pending in the committee, and then some of us are thinking that we should first work on right-sizing the government before we create new departments)," Sotto said in a recent DZMM interview. Sotto maintained that the creation new agencies should not be rushed as he noted that the government's expenses for operating and paying for wages of its employees take up 50 percent of the annual national budget. He said the rate, on the other hand, had declined from the previous 65 percent that they appropriate for the maintenance and operations of government agencies. He attributed it to the government's "good fiscal management" in the last few years. Sotto, last July, filed a bill seeking to rationalize the government agencies with related and overlapping functions by streamlining positions in the bureaucracy. He said this would improve delivery of public service. He also pushed for a similar measure in the 17th Congress. "January 20. 'Yong mga 'yon (departments of water and disaster management), pero kasabay na rin nung right-sizing muna 'yon," Sotto said. In his State of the Nation Address this year, President Duterte asked Congress to review and pass a government rightsizing bill to reconfigure bureaucracy and streamline government systems so that services would be delivered without delay over a short period of time.