Erap forms special team to handle barangay concerns

MANILA, Sept. 24 (PIA)—Manila Mayor Joseph Estrada has decided to form a special team to attend to all the concerns of the city’s 896 barangays.   In a statement, the mayor said that the move is aimed at speeding up the delivery of the city government’s programs and services to the grassroots.   

The mayor directed Arsenic Lacson, the officer-in-charge of the Manila Barangay Bureau (MBB) to establish a “One-Stop Shop” whose only task is to receive, answer, process, and follow up on the complaints, requests for assistance, and queries of the barangay officials.   

MBB is considered as the link of the Office of the Mayor to the barangays and serves as the mayor’s implementing agency on matters related to policies, issuances, programs, projects, laws and ordinances that may affect communities.   

Lacson explained that the special unit  within MBB  will be tasked to coordinate the needs of the barangays, from funding requests, appeals for assistance such as road repairs, garbage collection, conduct of social services to the communities, complaints and inquiries.   

Lacson described that during the current set up a barangay chairman usually forwards his concerns directly to the concerned department or office and waits for the response and actions, which on certain occasions, take a long time..   “What we want to happen is to receive all these official correspondence, forward it to the concerned offices, and then we will also be the one to make the follow-up and relay the result back to the barangay,” Lacson said.