Dagupan City is selected among the 21 dream cities by the Institute for Solidarity in Asia (ISA) which is undergoing series of consultative and working sessions on public governance system (PGS).

A second consultative meeting on PGS was staged yesterday (July 6) at the City Museum which highlighted the significance of good governance and responsible citizenship in order to further attain the visions for the city.

City Administrator Rafael Baraan led the department heads and city executives in the consultative session facilitated by the Institute for Solidarity in Asia (ISA).

ISA is a center of and for citizens committed to ethics, social responsibility and good governance in all aspects of life. It aims to contribute to raising the standards of public governance in the community and in the country.

The city government, led by Mayor Benjamin S. Lim has always noted the importance of the cooperation and commitment of the citizenry in making the visions for Dagupan City come true.

“Good governance is a shared responsibility between public officials and responsible citizens,” said ISA executive director Christian Zaens even as he noted that ISA’s approach is improving local governance.

PGS is a governance process and a system that is used to highlight the performance functions of strategy and policy formulation and at the same time connects those functions directly with monitoring and accountability. It uses scorecards to monitor and track progress, mainly as a positive instrument to improve governance and performance.

He said that Dagupan City was selected because Mayor Lim has been mentioned consistently by the ISA team.

Zaens noted that it is important to set the departments in the city hall to link to the roadmap of the city because each contribution of the department can be translated into a scorecard.

Nick Fontanilla of ISA explained that scorecard links vision and strategy into action.

Fontanilla explained that the city should not be the only one to have its scorecards but also the various sectors. He said, however, that these scorecards should be clearly connected and value adding to the scorecards of the city.

Fontanilla said that PGS translates strategy into measures that communicate the vision to stakeholders even as he stated that through PGS Dagupan can be a dream city.

After the discussion, the participants performed a workshop in developing a city roadmap. They were divided into four major sectors namely: economics, social services, economic support and finance.

Other cities in Luzon similarly undergoing the process of PGS are Marikina, Naga and San Fernando La Union. (Sunshine D. Robles)