Bulacan town accepts Metro garbage

CITY OF SAN JOSE DEL MONTE—Alerted by a reduction in next year’s Internal Revenue Allotments (IRA), the city government has decided to allow a private environmental landfill operator to accept waste from Metro Manila and its Bulacan neighbors to beef up its 2012 revenues, Mayor Reynaldo San Pedro said.

The decision could affect him politically, but San Pedro said he had been meeting with the League of Municipalities of the Philippines (LMP) and the League of Cities of the Philippines (LCP) about the city’s offer.

“The city council is now studying this process and the amount the city government has to collect as fee [from the privately run Vicente G. Puyat (VGP) Sanitary Landfill],” he said.

Nongovernment organizations and the Catholic Church have opposed the establishment of a commercial landfill in this city.

Early this week, Fr. Rolando de Leon of the Malolos Diocese and several groups staged a rally to express outrage at the operations of the VGP landfill.

A Department of Budget and Management statement posted on its website announced a smaller IRA share in 2012 because it would be computed against very poor collections in 2009. The IRA represents the local government share from taxes collected by the national government.

The DBM said the IRA for local governments would “decrease by P13.635 billion (or 4.8 percent) to P273.31 billion in 2012 as compared to P286.94 billion in 2011.”

The mayor did not say how much IRA the city received this year, but he stressed that San Jose del Monte needs alternative revenues to finance five resettlement sites developed by the national government, which are hosted by four villages here.

Most of the resettlement programs are for relocated Metro Manila squatters although one project is composed of a thousand housing units promised by President Aquino to resettle soldiers and police officers, San Pedro said.

The city has been hosting resettlement projects for the national government since 1973.

San Pedro said: “The population (currently pegged at 700,000 residents) continues to grow because of the resettled families but government reciprocated by slashing our IRA. Where will the city get money to provide services to our own residents and the resettled people?”

The landfill operator normally collects a tipping fee for each truckload of garbage that enters its gates, which would be collected on top of fees that the city government plans to impose.

San Pedro said the city government has planned well for its new role as a landfill service center for Metro Manila and neighboring Bulacan towns.

“Manila and Quezon City ended up with their Payatas dumpsite and their Smokey Mountain because they were not able to match their services with the pace of their growth as cities. We won’t let that happen here. We will plan ahead,” he said.

The city government spends P25,000 to P30,000 a day to collect domestic garbage that would be shipped to the VGP landfill. These expenses would be augmented by revenues which the city could generate when other towns pay to bring their garbage to the VGP landfill, he said. Carmela Reyes-Estrope, Inquirer Central Luzon