Bulatlat - The Philippines's alternative weekly newsmagazine

This story was taken from Bulatlat, the Philippines's alternative weekly newsmagazine (www.bulatlat.com, www.bulatlat.net, www.bulatlat.org).
Vol. V, No. 16, May 29-june 4, 2005

The ‘Cemetery’ Inside the House

Down the basement of the House of Representatives is the legislative archives that only academic researchers and enterprising reporters probably visit. Although the archive’s tens of thousands of old and crumpled documents are historical, they also attest to Congress’ record of performance – or non-performance.

BY AUBREY SC MAKILAN
Bulatlat

Albert Relosa, 33, has been working in the Legislative Archives Service of the House of Representatives in Quezon City for about five years now. When a congressional term ends, he receives all the documents, including those related with bills that the House did not pass. Thus, congressmen and House employees call Relosa’s office “the cemetery” since most of the documents it stores were “killed” bills.

Relosa however says he feels saddened whenever he sees a “killed” bill, particularly ones that he thinks would have benefited many people, such as the bills on the P125 across-the-board wage increase for workers – which has been refiled four times now and is currently on the second reading – and on the P3,000 wage hike for government employees.

“My wife is a teacher and the P3,000 wage increase would have been of great help to us,” he said. “I’m still hopeful it would be passed.”

Relosa said that about 75 percent of the bills from one Congress term are “killed” or do not become “republic acts.”

In the 12^th Congress, the House filed 6,697 bills while the Senate had 2,749 or a total of 9,446 bills. Out of the total only 76 bills (or just 1 percent) were enacted into law. Before that, the 11^th Congress (both House and the Senate) had 15,244 bills. Of these, only 415 or 3 percent became law.

Limitations

The Archives Service is home to Congressional documents dating as far back as 1946. Earlier documents which had only one copy, such as the 1899 Malolos Constitution, have been placed in a gallery inside the House. Likewise, files before the 1970s are no longer allowed to be photocopied since light and moist contribute to the deterioration of the paper.

A staff who refused to be identified told Bulatlat that it is the prerogative of the conservation section head whether to allow or prohibit the use of these materials. But in requests involving a political dynasty, the staff said, their section head could not say no. Once, he said, a younger politician requested for photocopies because he wanted to re-file his father’s bill. “The section head has the last say. How can he say no to a congressman?” he said.

Since the documents are accumulating after every Congressional term, the Archives Service has been lacking in space for storage. Most of the shelves were only improvised cabinets made by men from the Engineering Department. And since the office does not have enough space to accommodate as many cabinets as possible, they resort to piling the carton boxes containing committee papers.

But Alvin Manuel, 33, who has been with the conservation section of the Archives Service for seven years, said that even these cartons were not as durable as the ones they were issued three years ago. The ones they are using now crumple easily. He also told Bulatlat that the pile of boxes should be up to two levels only but because of space limitations, they themselves do not have a choice but to violate their own rule.

The boxes could be seen in all corners of the rooms. At the backmost part of the conservation room can be seen a pile of boxes and other “trash.” Manuel calls this their bodega (storage room) but he admitted that this is also where they place documents that are rarely used and looked for.

Carton boxes can even be found in the readers’ area, where the air conditioner can not support the needed temperature for preservation. But even inside the conservation room, only one air conditioner is functional.

With the government’s cost-cutting measures, the air conditioning units are turned off after office hours and opened at 8 a.m. the following day, unlike in the past when they were opened the whole day.

Digitization

With the advances in technology, the Archives Service’s members want to catch up by pushing the digitization of their system.

The normal practice of preserving a document is by putting each paper in a mylar film, a non-acidic polyester transparent film. But budget constraints would not allow them to do these for all the documents.

In fact, there are still so many papers left untreated. This includes documents rescued from a fire that struck the old Batasang Pambansa complex. Manuel was very careful in bringing out a half burnt copy of committee documents to show to Bulatlat.

Papers like these should have been converted to a microfilm but then, their microfilm machines have been inoperative for three years now. Because of this, they could not do the reel-to-reel tape transferring which is another preservation method for documents.

The only thing left that they can do is to put silica gels in the reel case to prevent molds from forming. But again, their budget could not provide enough silica gels for all the reel tapes.

Aside from the microfilm machine, Manuel also said that of the three reel tape players, only one is functional. Worse, they have no player for umatic tapes, which contain Congressional activities. Viewers would still need to go to the Media Office to see them.

“In the digitization process, these tapes would be converted into compact discs,” Manuel said, “but this may take long to be completed considering our insufficient budget.” Bulatlat

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