Difficult road seen for P10M anapog proposal at Cebu City Council

CHANCES of the Cebu City Council’s approval on the P10 million proposal to buy anapog (limestone) for the Inayawan landfill looks bleak.

Cebu City Councilor Joel Garganera said he is not bent on endorsing the approval of the proposal, which is still pending in the committee on environment which he heads.

“I have to maintain my stand that the reopening of the landfill is illegal. Anyway, the mayor has already proposed P600 million for the landfill in next year’s budget,” Garganera told reporters yesterday.

The executive department would have wanted to use the P10 million to buy anapog in order to cover the new garbage being dumped inside the landfill and at the same time to develop access roads within the facility.

Cebu City Mayor Tomas Osmeña has already agreed during last Monday’s Court of Appeals (CA) hearing that the city should stop dumping its garbage in the landfill if the CA would rule on the granting of a Temporary Environmental Protection Order (Tepo) against the operation of the landfill.

More time

Osmeña, however, asked for more time for the city to look for an alternative site to dump its garbage.

He asked that the city be allowed to operate the landfill until January 1 next year.

He said that the city would still need to look for a budget, realign it and at the same time put interested landfill owners and transporters through public bidding so that the city could go for the lowest bidder.

“But that would depend if it’s under my control. If the council sits on it, then that’s beyond my control,” Osmeña said in an interview yesterday.

Garganera said, though, that he would want the city to already close the landfill immediately. This is why he said he will just submit his position paper to the CA justices and wait for their resolution on his petition for the granting of the Tepo.

He said he was not planning to sit with the mayor, and he would just let the Department of Environment and Natural Resources (DENR) to come up with an agreed timeline on stopping the dumping of garbage in the landfill.

Certification

Garganera said the owners of the private landfill in Consolacion town had even issued a certification that they would be willing to continue accepting the city’s trash and discuss details to convince the mayor to dump the city’s garbage there.

He also said that they would be willing to set aside, at the moment, the P32-million dues that the city owed them so that they could properly discuss the dumping of the city’s waste in their facility again.

“He’s (Osmeña’s) just making it sound so difficult,” Garganera said.

The executive department has included a P600-million proposal for the closure and rehabilitation of the landfill under its proposed P7.2-billion budget for 2017.”

Cebu City Councilor Raymond Garcia, who is the vice chairperson of the council’s Committee on Budget and Finance, said that while he welcomed the mayor’s pronouncement on the stopping of the dumping of garbage in Inayawan, his proposal still had to be discussed.