IT IT’S in the law, we would have known about it. If it’s not in the law, we might have to contend ourselves with established practices that would not have any legal basis.
This seems to be the situation when it comes to master planning for Local Government Units (LGUs). As it is supposed to be, LGUs are supposed to produce their own master plans, but it seems that there are no clear guidelines as to where, when and why these should be submitted.
What is clear is that each and every LGU is supposed to submit their own Comprehensive Land Use Plans (CLUPs) every few years to the Housing and Land Use Regulatory Board (HLURB), a government agency that is under the supervision of the Housing & Urban Development Coordinating Council (HUDCC).
As I know it, many LGUs have already produced their own Geographic Information Systems (GIS), for whatever purpose it may serve them. More often than not, GIS is used for some mapping purposes, usually for tax mapping or hazard mapping, among other purposes.
In the case of tax mapping, it is usually used for the assessment of real property taxes, specifically for the purpose of establishing a Real Property Tax Information System (RPTIS). Hazard mapping appears to be a recent trend, perhaps influenced by accidents that are caused by natural and manmade disasters.
As I also know it, however, GIS projects at the LGU level are usually done for one purpose at a time, meaning to say that the purposes are not usually combined or coordinated.
Without any doubt, it could be said that in the case of manual mapping on paper, there should be no problem about making several maps for many purposes, whatever these purposes could be.
Not that they want to be malicious, but there are many people who are suspicious that some government offices tend to make several kinds of maps for many different purposes, not that it is practical for them to do so, but because they are using these maps as visual tools to project the image that they have many productive outputs.
Even if that could be the common behavior in the case of manual mapping, that should no longer be repeated in digital mapping, because the latter already allows multi-layer mapping within the same master map. (To be continued/PN)
