Cebu City to lease 5 trucks for 24/7 garbage collection

OSMEÑA

CEBU City Hall is planning to lease five dump trucks from the private sector in order to help the city’s garbage collection services.

Cebu City Mayor Tomas Osmeña, who described the move as an experiment, said this would be lucrative for both the city government and the winning bidder for the truck lease.

“Our lease is not just for 40 hours a week, not just Monday to Friday, eight hours a day. It is 24/7. Their revenue is not only based on 40 hours a week but 168 hours per week per truck,” Osmeña said.

Under the proposal, which the city is already preparing to put into a public bidding, the private provider of the five dump trucks will hire and pay its own driver as well as for the maintenance of the trucks.

On the other hand, the city will pay for the fuel that will be consumed by the five trucks and will assign garbage loaders to do the actual garbage collection.

Osmeña said he was planning to do this 24/7 garbage collection for 122 days as an experiment and would be implemented side-by-side with the new collection schedule, which would be implemented starting Sunday, Oct. 16.

P1K per hour, per truck

In the bid data sheet that the mayor showed reporters yesterday, the city would be willing to pay at most P1,000 per hour per truck to the winning bidder.

This would mean that the city would have to spend P120,000 per day for all five dump trucks doing non-stop garbage collection everyday.

This would be equal to P14.64 million that the city would spend for the entire 122 days of the experiment.

But the expense would still be lesser if there would be several bidders who could bid at a lower price to avail of the lease with City Hall.

“I am inviting the private sector. If you want to participate, this is a good time to have experience. It’s very profitable. That’s innovation in government. We have to find a better way of doing things,” Osmeña said.

The Department of Public Services (DPS) earlier announced the implementation of the new garbage collection schedule where the city would be
collecting garbage only from 5 p.m. to 7 a.m. the next day starting this Sunday, October 16.

Osmeña said his new experiment would be done alongside the new garbage collection schedule.
While the existing trucks of the DPS and the barangays will follow the new garbage collection schedule, the five outsourced dump trucks will still
do the 24/7 garbage collection.

He also said that leasing the trucks would also be a way to curb graft and corruption among drivers assigned to the trucks and save the city the headache of maintaining these vehicles.