Pampanga gov won’t renew quarry permit pending probe

Governor Lilia Pineda is deferring action on the application of a company to renew its permit to quarry rocks beside the Malele River in Porac town.

“I will not, I will not,” Pineda said on Thursday when asked if she was likely to extend the permit of Clarkstone Corp.

She said the provincial government would be the one to address its application after the complaint of the Nagkakaisang Mamamayan para sa Kalikasan at Agrikultura (Namaak) is investigated and resolved.

Namaak complained in a May 15 letter that the Clarkstone quarry had allegedly destroyed the riverbed and had reduced water meant for the local farmlands, according to the provincial administrator, Andres Panganiban Jr.

Quarrying has loosened the soil, threatening the safety of the Subic-Clark-Tarlac Expressway, which is located 2 kilometers to the west, Namaak president Jacinto Morales said.

Gilbert Baquing, Clarkstone president, said the company’s extraction activities were covered by a special power of attorney with the landowner, Pablo Sese, who obtained the land through the government’s agrarian reform program.

Last week, the Mines and Geosciences Bureau (MGB) and the provincial government’s environment and natural resources office (PG-Enro) sent a team to determine if Clarkstone was quarrying on the site for which it applied.

The environmental compliance certificate (ECC) covered 37,134 square meters. Documents showed that the site consisted of five lots, including Sese’s 7,170-sq m property.

Lormelyn Claudio, director of the Environmental Management Bureau (EMB) in Central Luzon, on Thursday confirmed that the ECC had expired on Jan. 26, 2011, four months before Pineda approved the quarry permit on May 6, 2011.

Claudio cited in her letter dated March 9, 2011, that an amendment to the ECC “makes its enforcement coterminus with the local permit.”

This was also stated in a review ordered by Pineda, in which Pangilinan said the “amended ECC was dated March 9, 2011 and [it was] coterminus to the permit issued by the province.”

“When the governor signed the permit, there was an approved ECC,” he said, adding that “all the requirements were fulfilled.”

The counsel of Namaak, lawyer Vivian Dabu, said this letter was not among the documents provided by the PG-Enro when she requested for all documents filed by Clarkstone.

However, its application to remove the two-year validity period of the ECC was filed only on May 30, said Reynaldo Garcia, provincial environmental management officer of the EMB.

“[While] the deliberation and endorsement of the application are all subject to the compliance of the submitted required documents, the approval is discretionary [on the part] of the governor,” said Danielo Uykieng, director of the MGB and chair of the provincial mining regulatory board. Tonette Orejas, Inquirer Central Luzon