City to dump garbage at SRP

OSMEÑA

City to comply with CA ruling, SRP lot to be used as temporary waste transfer station

Starting today (Saturday), the Cebu City government will start dumping the city’s collected garbage at the South Road Properties (SRP), which will be used as a temporary transfer station, to comply with the Court of Appeals’ (CA) order to close the Inayawan landfill.

This developed after the CA granted the first-ever Writ of Kalikasan in Cebu and ordered the Cebu City government to permanently stop dumping and disposing garbage at the Inayawan landfill.

“I already told the staff to follow the law and stop using the landfill already,” Mayor Tomas Osmeña told reporters yesterday.

Osmeña said that the Cebu City government would be establishing a transfer station at the SRP with the closure of the Inayawan landfill.

“They are deciding, by the coastal road. You cannot transfer anywhere until we have the budget. I do not have an idea when to start,” he told reporters when asked for a specific location of the transfer station.

But after the City Legal Office received an official copy of the decision of the Special 19th Division of the CA at 11:25 a.m. yesterday, the Department of Public Services (DPS) held an emergency meeting and scouted for open areas which the city could use as a temporary dumping area or transfer station where the collected garbage in the city could be dumped since they would have to follow the order and close the Inayawan landfill.

DPS head Roberto Cabarrubias said the site chosen was the South Road Properties (SRP).

“We found an area, around one hectare, behind the DPS building. We will use that for the next three days while we are developing the bigger area in between Filinvest (City di Mare) and SM Seaside. This will be our final temporary dumping area,” he told Cebu Daily News in a phone interview yesterday.

The decision to use the SRP lot as a temporary dumping area was decided after a meeting with DPS, General Services Office, and Cebu City Environment and Natural Resources Office (CCENRO) consultant Nida Cabrera yesterday.

Cabarrubias said it was agreed that the SRP would be used as a temporary dumping area until January next year when they would be able to conduct a bidding to hire private service providers to haul the garbage at the transfer station to a different landfill.

Cabarrubias said the lot at the back of the DPS building in the SRP near the DPWH-7 office would be the initial temporary dumping area for three days, because it could only accommodate that much garbage with the city’s daily garbage production of 500 tons.

Cabarrubias said starting Tuesday, they would use the three-hectare lot between the Filinvest property and SM Seaside. The site will be used as a dumping site for the rest of the month and probably in January also as the city bids out the services of private haulers.

Cabarrubias said among the terms for the private hauler is that they should have enough heavy equipment like payloader, bulldozer and backhoe as well as hauling trucks. They will be the one to bring the garbage from the transfer station all the way to a private landfill and will also be the one to pay for the tipping fee. There are also special conditions, according to Cabarrubias, including that the haulers should not dump the garbage at the private landfill in Consolacion town which was where the city used to dump its garbage. The city will also pay for all of these at a rate not more than P1,500, which was the amount paid by the previous administration to private haulers which brought the city’s garbage to the Consolacion landfill. But Councilor Joel Garganera, who was one of those who filed the Writ of Kalikasan petition before the CA last September, said that the city government cannot do that because they are making the locators’ lives miserable.

He also threatened to file a case at the Ombudsman if the city government would do it.

“Let them do it. When I filed the Writ of Kalikasan, I did not go directly to the Ombudsman. But if mao nay ilang buhaton, most likely I do not have to wait for the EMB (Environmental Management Bureau) to file an admin (administrative), criminal or civil case against them. Ako mismo mofile sa Ombudsman,” said Garganera on the city government’s decision to make a temporary waste transfer station at the SRP.

Klaro ilang gibuhat. They are trying to go after the locators. Binuang man ni sa mayor. Let him do it. Tan-awon nato. Dili na ni maayo ba (Let us see. This is not a good thing that they will do),” he said.

“We know that, binuang man ni ila gibuhat,” he said.