An Act Creating the Municipality of Tugunan, Appropriating Funds Therefor, and for Other Purposes

This constitutes the Municipality of Tugunan in the Special Geographic Areas, out of 8 barangays — 7 from Pikit and Tapodoc from Aleosan, both in North Cotabato Pikit and Aleosan, North Cotabato, with its seat of government at Barangay Manaulanan.

The annex is the substance. It lists every constituent barangay with its land area, population and annual income as of 2020, totalling about 102.6 square kilometers, 30,651 residents and roughly ₱37.1 million in combined annual income. The territorial boundary follows the existing barangay lines.

The machinery is identical across all 8. Corporate existence arrives only on ratification by a majority of the votes cast in a plebiscite in the constituent barangays within 60 days of approval, conducted by COMELEC through the Bangsamoro Electoral Office and charged to COMELEC's own appropriations for the year. The first mayor, vice-mayor and 8 Sangguniang Bayan members are appointed by the Chief Minister and hold office until successors are elected at the next general local elections, while incumbent councillors of the mother municipality who live in the new one serve out their terms there. And because a new municipality has no revenue share until the national allotment reaches it, the Bangsamoro Government must provide not less than ₱2,500,000 every month to run it in the meantime.

Section 2 of every bill in this set carries the fact that explains all of them: these barangays petitioned and voted to be included in the Bangsamoro in the 2019 plebiscite. They chose the region, and then spent years inside it while still administratively attached to a municipality outside it — paying taxes to, and receiving services from, a local government in North Cotabato that they had voted to leave. These bills resolve that anomaly by giving the barangays municipalities of their own.

This bill became BAA 47 on 17 August 2023, keeping its name. The name and the seat both held. The barangay count is the one thing that does not match: this bill lists 8 — 7 from Pikit plus Tapodoc from Aleosan — while the enacted act is recorded as constituting 9 from Pikit and Aleosan. The annexed population is the same 30,651 in both, so if a barangay was added it brought no population with it, and the more likely explanation is a counting difference to be checked against the signed act.

Like Bill No. 131, this measure reaches across a provincial municipality's line to pick up a single barangay — Tapodoc from Aleosan. Those single-barangay additions are what make the Special Geographic Areas awkward to draw: the 2019 vote was taken barangay by barangay, so the resulting territory is not a block of contiguous municipalities but a patchwork that has to be reassembled from pieces of 5 different North Cotabato towns.

Eight cabinet bills were filed together in December 2022 to constitute the Special Geographic Areas as municipalities — Bills 129 through 136 — and all 8 became law on 17 August 2023 as BAA 41 through 48. Parliament's bills index records that outcome for Bill No. 136 alone. The other 7, this one among them, are still listed as sitting at Second Reading, Committee Stage, three years after they were enacted.

The plebiscite question is the same across the set and cuts the same way. The vote is held only in the barangays being constituted, so the North Cotabato municipality losing them has no say — which is defensible here in a way it is not elsewhere in the registry, because these barangays had already voted in 2019 to leave that province altogether. What the design does not address is the mother municipality's own position: it loses territory, population and revenue by a regional law it cannot vote on, under a national allotment formula nobody in this Parliament controls.