Dayanghirang: 2017 budget to breach this year’s P6.3 B

By Cheneen R. Capon
REELECTIONIST councilor Danilo C. Dayanghirang, Davao City Council finance and ways and means committee chairman, said the annual budget of the city in 2017 will breach this year’s P6.3 billion.
Speaking to reporters covering the weekly Kapehan sa Dabaw last Monday, Dayanghirang said he based his optimism on the fact that the city’s annual revenue income has been increasing every year.
“We expect our budget next year to reach P6.5 billion,” the veteran local lawmaker said, adding that the annual general appropriation in 2016 is 25 percent higher than the P5.8-billion in 2015.
Dayanghirang bared that the City Treasurer’s Office has greatly improved its tax collection efficiency.
“When we got in (referring to his return to the city council in 2013), one of the problems that we had observed was a sluggish collection of real property tax (RPT),” he said.
RPT is one of the main sources of income of the city government along with revenues from some several other sources like the city’s economic enterprises such as public markets, public cemeteries, slaughterhouses and the Davao City Transport Terminal.
He said the improvement in the collection came after city councilors led by Dayanghirang inquired into the poor collection performance, particularly the delinquencies in real property taxes and its poor collection method.
Dayanghirang said City Treasurer Rodrigo Riola initiated a data cleansing activity that resulted in the drastic decrease in the number of delinquent taxpayers.
Riola had reported that as of November last year, the city was running after P267-million in RPT collectibles from taxpayers who are having difficulty in paying taxes as their landholdings were unproductive because they are occupied by informal settlers.