Is There Room (Literally) for Your Reform?

By -
Free Patent Application Center, Consolacion Municipal Assessor's Office, Cebu Province
In a local government unit, resources are always tight. There’s just about enough funds for essential supplies, equipment, overhead, personnel. There are barely enough people to carry the regular workload plus the Mayor’s (or Governor’s) special projects. Even office space is limited.

So when somebody comes up with a brilliant reform idea, practical managers will always ask, “do we have resources for that?” The easy answer is “no”.

But when there’s enough buy-in into the reform, something interesting happens. Committed personnel are trained to implement the reform. Even when everyone’s already up to their necks with work. 

Budget for essential reform activities is found. 

Office space is allocated for reform use. With the corresponding signage, no less.

In any Assessor’s Office there would be space for the library of section maps, Field Appraisal and Assessment Sheets, and Tax Declarations. There would be space, desks and chairs for basic functions. And there would be qualified personnel manning these desks.

In the Municipality of Consolacion, Province of Cebu, in addition to all of these, there is a place for “Free Patents”. There’s a desk, chairs, and a trained employee assigned to handle client’s concerns. All these manifesting Municipal Assessor Malou Herrera’s commitment to her local government’s partnership with DENR for public land titling. Because even when resources are tight, when the reform is taken to heart there will always be room for better service.
What resources are needed for your reform? Are the implementors willing to commit these resources?

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Orientation in OODA - Discerning Opportunites to Improve the DENR Business Model for Titling Services

By -
O rientation is basically analysis and synthesis of Observations in the light of new information and previous experiences (Boyd says Orientation is also influenced by one’s genetic heritage and cultural traditions).  Each person Orients himself in a different way – consider a game of chess, where both players observe exactly the same pieces on the same squares, but see different opportunities and threats. When we looked at DENR’s old business model for issuance of titles, we observed several things. First, with regards to Customers, it was noted that prior to RA 10023 the only two ways Residents got their titles were to either buy it from the State (through a Miscellaneous Sales Agreement) or go through the judicial process. Both could be costly; the latter could take a long time. RA 10023 provided a great opportunity to speed up titling for Residents. DENR’s Value Proposition is uncontested – it is indeed the authority for public land titling and it does have the m...
Read more

Towards a Development Entrepreneurship Community of Practice

By -
Image
A fter three workshops on Development Entrepreneurship (held in Quezon City, Davao, and Cebu City), we have gathered plenty of feedback from participants, and so there's much to think about. There are practical ideas for improving the workshop, like spending more time for introductions and small-group work, samples of filled-up Tools, guide questions for writing the Theory of Change, etc. Our participants included development professionals, some funders, and members of the academe.  There's been much discussion about how funders can support the DE approach given their traditional desire for certainty, which they try to enforce with deliverables and timetables.  This reflects the dialogue that's going on with the global development community, as all actors find their footing with adaptive development strategies. Two questions from participants that resonate with me are a) will the DE approach still be useful if policy is not the problem?, and b) can the DE a...
Read more

Picking a Development Reform Agenda through Service Analysis

By -
T he Business Dictionary (http://www.businessdictionary.com) defines a Service as “A valuable action, deed, or effort performed to satisfy a need or to fulfill a demand”.  Social, economic and political institutions were established to perform actions to satisfy needs; in other words, to provide services. Failure to provide services effectively leads to undesired conditions (e.g., malnutrition, inefficient industries, low rate of land titling) which attract the attention of Development Reformists. It does not take much for a Development Reformists to know that something is broken somewhere, and needs to be fixed. It takes much effort to find out exactly what is broken, how it is broken, and how it can be fixed. The answers to these questions comprise a set of possible Development Reform agendas, which can be filtered further by the twin lenses of technical soundness and political feasibility. Is there a systematic way to generate ideas for reform? This blog suggests that s...
Read more