Cebu City Mayor Tomas Osmeña
It’s either the Inayawan landfill or residents will end up with the South Road Properties (SRP) as the new dumpster for Cebu City’s tons of garbage.
This was Cebu City Mayor Tomas Osmeña’s way of saying no for the nth time, as he continues to reject the repeated calls and recommendations of various groups and agencies
to shut down the 17-year-old Inayawan landfill, the latest of which came from the Department of Health in Central Visayas (DOH-7).
“I will not close the landfill. But if they insist, I will put it (garbage) in the SRP. It’s up to the engineers (where exactly). I don’t know. Somewhere where it’s easy to put. If they don’t like SRP, we’ll put it at Malacañang sa Sugbo. If they don’t like, here at City Hall, legislative building,” he said in a press conference yesterday.
The mayor lamented why DOH-7 did not ask him or meet with him before coming up with the recommendation for the closure of the landfill.
He also questioned why the recommendation first reached Cebu City Councilor Joel Garganera, the head of the city council’s committee on environment, who has been advocating for the closure of the landfill.
“I suspect there’s a conspiracy between some government officials here because there is a trend (to try to convince) me to use the private hauler and sanitary landfill (in Consolacion) where we spend up to P300 million a year,” Osmeña said.
Council’s move
However, even Osmeña’s allies in the City Council did not object to the resolutions of the Team Rama-led majority bloc for the city government to close the Inayawan landfill and to look for alternative sites where the city can dump its approximately 400 to 500 tons of garbage a day.
The council’s move came after Garganera, in a privilege speech in yesterday’s council session, again asked the mayor to heed the growing complaints on the stench coming from the landfill and close it already.
Garganera said the city should listen to the people’s sentiments as well as the recommendations of government agencies like the DOH and the Environmental Management Bureau (EMB) of the Department of Environment and Natural Resources (DENR) 7.
“I believe that it is time to stop the arguments and act on the urgent problem that our city is facing today. It is time to show them results and to let them know that the health, the safety and the future of the people of Cebu will remain to be the priority of this government,” he said.
The council then passed a corollary motion by Councilor Raymond Alvin Garcia authorizing the mayor to negotiate for and behalf of the city with other alternative dumping sites or landfills like in Consolacion and in the cities of Talisay or Naga, among others.
The motions were not opposed by the Bando Osmeña-Pundok Kauswagan (BO-PK) bloc of the council.
But Councilor Sisinio Andales spoke on behalf of the mayor and said that if the city decides to immediately close the landfill without enough time to prepare an alternative, the mayor would likely have to deal with a public outcry over uncollected garbage.
The city needs time to look for a proper site, maybe two or three months at least, he said.
But Garganera said that if Osmeña would continue to insist on using the Inayawan landfill, he will make good his threat to file a petition for a Writ of Kalikasan before the Court of Appeals to compel the city to shut it down.
Garganera, in his speech, also criticized the mayor’s plan to give a P5,000 financial assistance to the University of Cebu-Maritime Education and Training Center (UC-METC) students who earlier complained of the landfill’s smell affecting their classes.
“The students at UC, and indeed, the residents of Inayawan and nearby barangays, as well as the SRP, deserve more than an insulting P5,000 consuelo de bobo. They need to be assured of their health, their safety and their future. This has been my priority, and that should be the priority of the council and the mayor,” he said.
Disturbance fee
The mayor’s offer, he added, is actually an admission from Osmeña that the continued operation of the landfill is causing inconvenience to people.
Osmeña, during his press conference, said that Garganera may be right in calling his cash offer to the students as a form of bribery.
But he said he considers it as a “disturbance fee” since they’re the most affected. He added that he might consider also giving cash assistance to other residents and schools in the area. But there will be no aid for businesses, he said, as only the students and the residents need the money.
The mayor said the city would only need to work on addressing the smell and expand the landfill’s capacity and it would be good for at least another decade.
“If we’re good, (we can use Inayawan) forever. I don’t want to go anywhere else. The first stage is to address the smell. If we address the smell, we can fix the landfill and make it last up to 10 years,” he said.
Among his plans is to put up a high retaining wall to contain the garbage and also to block the landfill from public view.
He said the city also received offers to build waste-to-energy plants at the 15-hectare landfill, converting the gas produced by waste products into electricity.
If the city decides on a waste-to-energy facility, he said he would want it piloted on a smaller area to test its viability before going full blast with the chosen proposal.