BINMALEY, Pangasinan, (PNA)–Two officials of the local government were given 60-day preventive suspension due to a formal administrative cases for dishonesty and neglect in the performance of duty filed against them.
Lawyer Armenio Escat Jr., municipal administrator, explained the preventive suspension on Gertrudez Reyes, municipal accountant; and Jeffrey de los Angeles, budget officer, was only intended to prevent them from exerting undue influence on their respective offices while the administrative cases filed against them are still being heard.
The preventive suspension on the two began Aug. 27.
Escat said the preventive suspension was given by Mayor Simplicio Rosario as the disciplining officer soon after the two were made to answer the complaints filed against them but their answers were found unsatisfactory.
Escat said the cases, stemmed from the exhausted budgets for gasoline and lubricants in the mayor’s office and the municipal administrator’s office left by the previous municipal administration though there are six months more to go before the year ends.
He said the budget for maintenance in the amount of P4.2 million was down to only P2,000; the financial assistance of P3 million for individuals in distress is down to only P100,000 and the P1 million allotted for Gender and Development (GAD) was down to P69,000.
The GAD budget, Escat said, should not have been touched unless spent for the very purpose for which it was really intended.
On the now zero budgets for gasoline and lubricants, Escat said this happened even if almost all the official vehicles of the municipal government were under state of disrepair during the term of Mayor Lorenzo Cerezo.
He said without a budget for gasoline, municipal officials are now paying for their own consumption to ensure the delivery of public service.
Escat is the head of the investigating committee with members from the different departments of the municipal government.