IN THE beginning, some city officials worried that the ordinance gave NGOs and POs too much authority. But Robredo would always argue that they should be more concerned with what would happen to city hall once they are all gone. He points out, "We'll not be in city hall forever. Everyone felt that we're doing the right thing, we're okay, so it's not necessary. I said it's necessary because sometimes we need to have people who will disagree with us."

	THE Naga City Citizen's Board provides Nagueños with information and updates about their local government. [photo by Alecks P. Pabico]

"But we will not question their motives," he adds. "Because if you have people who have questionable motives questioning you, sometimes you say this is just a political issue. But when you have people questioning you who you do not doubt, are well-meaning, then you listen."

Illustrative of this healthy and dynamic relationship between City Hall and civil society is how a 1997 proposal to set up a golf course in Naga was settled. Robredo was for the golf course, but the NCPC campaigned against it citing environmental concerns. The mayor eventually had to concede defeat.

Under Robredo, the NCPC has executed programs like managing the caterers during the recent staging of the Palarong Pambansa hosted by the city. The council was also put in charge of the multisectoral Task Force Reming, which raised more than P3 million for Naga's post-typhoon relief and repair efforts in all 27 barangays. Through Archbishop Legazpi's intercession, the task force obtained an additional P30 million from the national calamity fund to repair school buildings. (To date though, Naga has yet to receive a single peso from the national government allocation. In the aftermath of Reming's devastation, there has been no relief assistance from the national government for the city.)

Robredo now wants the NCPC to go beyond its facilitative role in the policy formulation process in the sanggunian. He thinks the people's council should take the lead in crafting a legislative agenda for the different sectors that would then be enacted into ordinances and translated into programs.

But this "special" place of NGOs and people's organizations in the affairs of the local government has not escaped political intrigue, with the NCPC accused of collusion or that it has already been co-opted by City Hall. Fr. Tria thinks these accusations are unfortunate. If the NCPC rarely has differences with the local government now, he says, it is because "(we) exist in a friendly environment."

For NCPC Secretariat member Johann de la Rosa, the collusion issue can only come from sectors that are clueless about the context of the relationship, and hence feel they are not favored. He also says that the NGO-PO community is influential because of its established relationship with the government. "It exists to provide credible comments, not mere criticisms," de la Rosa says, even declaring that the NCPC is the "credible opposition in Naga, not the camp of the Villafuertes."

ROBREDO'S STRONG commitment to civic engagement in charting Naga's development path would also lead to another pioneering governance innovation. Winning a fresh term in 2001 after a two-year sabbatical at the Harvard University's John F. Kennedy School of Government, he realized that only about 30 percent of Naga's residents belong to an NGO or people's organization and whose concerns may be different from the rest.

	MAYOR Robredo's haul of awards, including the 2000 Ramon Magsaysay Award for Government Service, on display in his office. [photo by Alecks P. Pabico]

"The challenge then was how do we engage with the households," he recounts. "So probably majority are interested with making sure that when they apply for a permit, everything is in order. They get it as correctly and as quickly as they can. They're interested with busted street lamps at the corners near their houses. They're interested with clogged drainages, garbage being collected, etc."

The initiative is called i-Governance (i to reflect the project's inclusive, information-open, interactive, and innovative characteristics) and gives Nagueños all the information about their local government. As Robredo envisions it, this would enable the city's residents to fully use the services provided by the city government — and tell city officials and employees if they are performing below expectations.

i-Governance has two basic features: offline (a charter) and online (a website). The Naga City Citizens Charter is a guidebook on the city government's key services, each of which gets a detailed description. There are step-by-step instructions on how to use each service, the standard response time for its delivery, and the city hall officers and staff responsible for its operation. There is also a list of requirements a customer must comply with to facilitate service delivery, plus location maps of the departments handling the enumerated services.

The website, Naga.gov, meanwhile, caters to Naga residents with Internet connectivity. The site provides accurate, relevant and essential information about Naga, including an extensive city profile, urban indicators and statistics, tourism assets, investment opportunities, and downloadable maps and tables.

An online component of the website called NetServe has an extensive catalog of City Hall's services and, just like the charter, lists procedures, response time, and responsible personnel for each of these. Plus, it contains information about the city's finances, including the annual city budget; postings of biddings and public offerings and their outcomes; city ordinances and resolutions; and a directory of city officials, complete with their contact numbers and email addresses.

Then there is TextServe, a cell phone-based service that allows Naga residents to send queries and feedback to the city government through short message service (SMS) or text. Launched in April 2003, Nagueños have been using it to comment on development programs and policies, as well as to complain, usually about drainage systems and collection of fees.

	A TALE of two Naga City waiting sheds. [photos by Alecks P. Pabico]

i-Governance's concomitant streamlining of processes and computerization of basic applications have dramatically improved the delivery of city hall's frontline services. For instance, the determination of business and real property tax due has been reduced from four hours to one minute. Birth certificates are now issued within 30 minutes when in the past it took almost a week's wait. The processing of mayor's permits is down to half an hour from two hours; and building permits, from 15 days (as mandated by the National Building Code) to just five days.

Yet while such efforts have won acclaim anew for Naga, Robredo says all the recognitions and awards are mere affirmations of what he believes is the single most important achievement of his administration: making the Nagueño believe in himself.

"I think," says the mayor, "if there's anything that we've done here, it's making the Nagueño proud, that, you know, I am a Nagueño, we can be as good as anyone, we can achieve many things that we have all along thought we cannot achieve."

Gumba agrees. If Naga residents, he says, are more empowered than before, are emboldened to be more active in public and governance issues, it can only be attributed to the city government's openness and transparency. He notes, "People visit the mayor and they see him conduct above-the-table transactions. This encourages them to even criticize him — and that's also being participatory."