"x x x.
Trial court vacancies. Sen. Franklin Drilon discovered, during a recent hearing of the Senate committee on finance he heads, that 591 trial courts, or about 26 percent of all “organized” trial courts, are vacant. No wonder case congestion and delays plague the system, he concluded.
He observed that these vacancies were funded in the national budget. But the money allocated for them were saved, “realigned” and disbursed as additional compensation for sitting judges and court personnel. In addition, docket fees were increased and used also to support additional judicial allowances called SAJ (“Special Allowance for Judges”). In the past, these “realignments” and use of SAJ irritated relations between the Supreme Court on the one hand, and Malacañang and Congress on the other.
In response to Drilon, Chief Justice Maria Lourdes P. A. Sereno, who now chairs the Judicial and Bar Council, agreed to hasten the short list for all vacancies to enable President Aquino to fill them up such that by 2015, the entire judicial machinery would be fully functioning, which also means there will be no more “savings” to augment judicial compensation.
Stabilizing judicial compensation. To solve this “no-more-savings” problem, the executive branch represented by Budget Secretary Florencio “Butch” Abad and the legislative branch represented by Drilon (Senate finance committee chair) and Cavite Rep. Joseph Emilio Abaya (House appropriations committee chair) agreed, during a private meeting I hosted, to provide enough funds from the national treasury to retain and stabilize the present compensation of judges, as follows:
Regional trial court judges—P128,198.66 a month, composed of P73,099 basic salary plus P29,766.66 allowances and P25,333 SAJ; metropolitan trial judges—P119,209.66 composed of P67,684 basic plus P27,166.66 allowances and P24,359 SAJ; and municipal trial judges—ranging from a total of P110,925.33 to P102,612.33 a month.
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