Baguio starts collecting garbage taxes

Starting next month, barangay (village) leaders will collect P20 garbage fees from 301,926 residents to help improve a solid waste management system that has been blamed for a fatal trash slide in August.

Fresh from working out a garbage segregation scheme, Mayor Mauricio Domogan deputized the local leaders to collect the garbage fees from every household, using an unenforced provision of the city’s 2003 tax ordinance.

Administrative Order 132, which Domogran issued on October 12, institutionalizes a barangay board collection system that is guided by Tax Ordinance 2003-03.

Expenses for clearing a trash slide that killed six people along Asin Road have been costing the city millions of pesos, according to city treasury officials.

Work to haul out garbage from Km 5 on Asin Road, which straddles Baguio and neighboring Tuba town in Benguet, has been extended by another month because of the volume of trash that collapsed from the 37-year-old decommissioned dump atop Barangay Irisan.

The old garbage is being hauled to a commercial landfill in Capas town in Tarlac.

The city government also sends out potable water to 280 households in Barangay Tadiangan in Tuba, whose water sources were contaminated by the trash slide, according to the Department of Health.

Baguio is using its calamity funds worth about P90 million.

But the latest garbage tax imposition has drawn fire from households, who learned that the first collections would include a 10 percent surcharge,  said Cordelia Lacsamana, city environment officer.

She said the tax ordinance requires households to pay their garbage fees at City Hall, but no one has done it in eight years since the law was enacted.

“Barangays will start collecting fees covering October, but since the fees will be collected a month later, it will include the surcharge of P2 because the law has been in effect,” she said.

Garbage fees are included in business taxes and real estate taxes, but these cover the waste collection services offered by the government to business establishments and developed properties.

“Every person living in apartment buildings also need to pay fees for garbage services and these are the individuals whom the barangays will target,” she said.

The city environment and parks management office has been the target of criticism since September for imposing a “no-segregation-no-collection” policy.

Residents resisted the city government’s waste segregation program when 16 trucks failed to collect trash on time due to simultaneous road constructions that impeded traffic flow, Lacsamana said.

But Domogan resolved the problem by commissioning a private contractor to haul out plastics and nonbiodegradable trash directly from the villages to a material recovery facility in Rosales town in Pangasinan.