It only took a few hours’ visit by Environment secretary Gina Lopez to order the closure of the Inayawan landfill, something which opponents like City Councilor Joel Garganera and the rest of his allies in the City Council had to go to court to do.
So what’s it going to be? Only the Court of Appeals can decide, and today’s hearing will supposedly have Cebu City Mayor Tomas Osmeña pleading his administration’s case to retain the Inayawan landfill site rather than closing it despite an order from Secretary Lopez who was clearly bothered by the presence of garbage from the Inayawan landfill creeping into the sea.
That was the last straw aside from the offensive smell that somehow wasn’t covered by the soil dumped into the area by the city government. But to Mayor Osmeña, it’s somehow cheaper to maintain the Inayawan landfill than to close it and find another one, which would run into hundreds of millions of pesos at least.
Still, the mayor took note of the possibility that the landfill/dumpsite will be closed and allocated P600 million for its closure/maintenance whichever comes first.
Ideally, the Inayawan landfill should have never been reopened in the first place despite the atrociously expensive deal with the private landfill operator in Consolacion town.
Then former mayor Michael Rama somehow failed to follow through with an aggressive waste segregation and collection program and had to rely on the city’s coffers to pay for the tipping fee, which depleted the one-year budget allocated for it by only six months or June last year.
But granted that the payments went overboard and it wasn’t covered by a contract at that, still the reopening of the Inayawan landfill was a band-aid measure that not only failed to hold up the festering problem of garbage in the city but also exposed the landfill’s dangerously foul smell to the outlying communities, including schools whose students had to wear face masks to protect themselves.
It was already unfit to use back in 2005, and that early, the city government which was then headed by Osmeña should have built another dumpsite and closed the Inayawan landfill for good.
But it wasn’t done for one reason or another, and only the mayor could answer why he failed to do that since if he did it back then, the problem wouldn’t haunt and come back to bite him when he went back to City Hall this year.
If there was a plan to close the landfill, then it would have been developed into a park as envisioned by Rama or a golf course as planned by Osmeña. Either way, it would been cleaned up long ago.
And now, Mayor Osmeña knows that he will have to close the Inayawan landfill sooner than later with Secretary Lopez’s order. It is up to the Court of Appeals to give the secretary’s order more teeth for him to finally yield and close the dumpsite for good.