(CDN FILE PHOTO)
LOCATORS at the South Road Properties (SRP) refused to comment on plans of Cebu City Mayor Tomas Osmeña to temporarily dump garbage at a vacant lot between the properties of two big property developments at the SRP.
These two developments are the Filinvest Land Inc.’s City di Mare and SM Seaside City Cebu.
SM Seaside City Cebu said that management opted not to comment on the matter for now.
“As per higher management, we will not issue a statement at this time,” the source said.
Cebu Daily News sought Filinvest Land Inc. (FLI) for comment, but text messages and calls made to its representatives were unanswered.
Businessman Bunny Pages, whose restaurant Lantaw is located across the site where the city planned to make into a transfer station, also held back on commenting on the issue.
“With this development, I really don’t know what’s going to happen,” he said in a text message.
The restaurant owner was in Taipei and said he would give his comment on the issue when he would get back next week.
Pages earlier bucked the reopening of the Inayawan landfill at the start of Osmeña’s term, saying that his sales dropped by nearly half since.
He said restaurant customers have constantly been complaining about the smell coming from the landfill.
CDN also tried to get a reaction from the Cebu Chamber of Commerce and Industry and the Cebu Business Club on the city’s move at the SRP, but the representatives of these business organizations could not be reached for comment.
Mayor Tomas Osmeña’s decision last Friday was prompted by the Court of Appeals (CA) granting the Writ of Kalikasan and ordering the Cebu City government to close and rehabilitate the Inayawan landfill.
Osmeña said that they would follow the law and told his staff to stop using the landfill already.
However, he said that they would establish a transfer station for the city’s garbage at the SRP.
Osmeña said that he did not know how to start because they did not have any budget.
But a few hours after the City Legal Office received a copy of the CA order last Friday, the Department of Public Services (DPS), the General Services Office (GSO) and the City Environment and Natural Resources Office (Cenro) Consultant Nida Cabrera met and decided to dump the city’s garbage on areas to be used as temporary transfer stations at the SRP.
Roberto Cabarrubias, DPS head, said that they would dump the garbage starting yesterday at the one-hectare open lot at the back of the DPS office at the SRP.
Cabarrubias said, however, that after three days (on Tuesday next week), they would use the three-hectare lot between Filinvest Land Inc.’s City di Mare and SM Seaside City as the temporary transfer station of the city’s garbage.
Cabarrubias said they had to move the transfer station to the three-hectare lot because the one-hectare lot at the back of the DPS could not accommodate the city’s daily production of 500 tons of garbage.
Mayor Osmeña has focused on two big locators (SM and Filinvest) at the SRP a few days after he was proclaimed winner in the elections in May.
Osmeña then threatened to revoke the sale of a 26-hectare lot to SM-Ayala consortium and a 19-hectare lot to Filinvest, which was consummated during then mayor Michael Rama’s term.
Osmeña claimed then that the sale was “highly dubious.”
Last month, Osmeña filed a complaint of “Other Deceits” under Article 318 of the Revised Penal Code against SM Prime Holdings Inc. (SMPHI) represented by four of their top executives including board chairman Hans Sy for allegedly paying much lesser than their supposed real property tax for the their SM Seaside City Cebu mall at the SRP.
Osmeña claimed that SM only paid P14 million in real property tax when the company should have paid P37.6 million.
In answer to Mayor Osmeña’s complaint, SM Prime Holding Inc. in a statement said that it maintained it had been compliant with all the tax regulations and had timely and properly paid its real estate tax obligations on its SM Seaside property based on tax declarations and corresponding tax assessments duly issued by the City of Cebu.
SM then said that they could not comment on the complaint until they could refer the matter to their tax department.
A few days later after the mayor filed a complaint against SM, Osmeña then held in abeyance all pending applications for building or occupancy permits of Il Corso, a mixed-use development of Filinvest at the SRP and other big developments in the area including SM for allegedly violating setback requirements.