Talking about garbage, again
The Cebu City Council is talking about garbage once more, and it only bolstered an observation we have long been making, that the City Government’s solid waste management leaves much to be desired since the Court of Appeals ordered it to close the old Inayawan dump site. Worse, there seems to be no effort to find better ways to dispose of the city’s trash and put a long-term plan in place.
During Wednesday’s budget hearing, the Department of Public Services (DPS) sought the inclusion of more than P200 million for garbage collection in Supplemental Budget 1. This would be spent for garbage hauling until the end of the year and for the rental of 10 compactor trucks and five open dump trucks to augment City Hall’s 24 garbage trucks.
The proposal naturally invited deeper scrutiny, especially from the opposition Barug Team Rama councilors, especially because the amount sought would push the city’s expenses for garbage collection and disposal to almost P400 million this year. While DPS Chief Roberto Cabarrubias explained that this was due to the increasing volume of the garbage collected, he didn’t also come up with better and cheaper garbage collection and disposal system.
An interesting observation made by Barug Team Rama’s Eduardo Rama goes into the heart of the city’s solid waste management woes post-Inayawan dump site use. Under the current setup, trash in the city’s barangays are first brought to a private transfer station in Inayawan before the hauler, currently Pasajero Motors Corp., to a private sanitary landfill in Consolacion town.
Rama correctly noted how garbage collectors from the city’s northern barangays, which are closer to Consolacion, still have to bring the trash to Inayawan when it would have been cheaper to bring these directly to the sanitary landfill. But that could not be done because Osmeña refuses to deal directly with the landfill’s owner, whose previous garbage disposal contract with former mayor Michael Rama the current mayor, Tomas Osmeña, had described as anomalous.
But if the city government could not even straighten out its garbage collection and disposal act in the short term, how can it come up with a viable, forward-looking and creative solid waste management program in the long-term?