Lim’s Dagupan City is a dumpsite

By Ermin Garcia Jr.

 

DAGUPAN City is no longer the clean prosperous city but beginning to be a serious eyesore that indicates the kind of or the absence of governance in the city today.

I am in receipt of pictures from PUNCH readers bewailing the continued complete disregard of residents’ health by leaving piles of uncollected garbage on the streets.

Indeed, the city has not seen such a dysfunctional governance at any time in the past.

Is it possible that Mayor Brian Lim has been out of the country and, therefore, has not been seen nor heard from to explain the nauseating situation obtaining in his city for the past weeks?

Or is Mayor Lim deliberately making the situation untenable as a predicate to his plan to implement costly garbage hauling and collection without as much holding a public bidding being an emergency situation if only to milk the city dry for his man-made garbage crisis?

It is even disappointing to see the city councilors tiptoeing around Mr. Lim by calling out the head of the Waste Management Division instead of the mayor himself to explain how the crisis reached this point. In such a crisis, it is the chief executive that has to be made fully accountable and responsible. But the city council is not calling out the mayor. Or the city administrator. Why?

I’m beginning to suspect that the scheduled Question Hour is just a part of a plot and a contrived script to secure the justification of a costly garbage hauling contract to the tune of P70-M. This is no time for bureaucracy and red tape.

The city council should call out the source and the cause of the problem – absence or poor governance of the Lim administration from the top!

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NO JUSTIFICATION FOR SPENDING. What cannot ever justify expenditure of P70-M by merely showing proofs of failure of a segregation policy, is the knowledge that there is an instant solution available to the city that won’t cost the city a centavo.

 The immediate solution to the garbage crisis is staring right at everyone’s eyes, particularly those of Mayor Lim. It is the immediate implementation of the Waste-to-Worth program that will allow the wastes at the closed dumpsite to be removed completely as a result of the project.

 The program, as has been repeatedly told, will not require the city government to spend a single centavo but it now appears today that it is precisely this term that Mr. Lim is object to.  He wants to spend P70-M! It surely doesn’t have to take a freshman political science student to discern what the motive is – big time graft and corruption!

 Indeed, a P70-M contract can make someone earn at least a cool P21-M (that’s only to cover the usual 30% kickback rate today) and another percentage for ghost hauling and deliveries.

 By the way, I am also in receipt of pictures from a concerned citizen of some garbage being dumped recently at an area near the closed dumpsite – the area controlled by Mr. Lim’s consultant, Mr. Teddy Villamil. It’s the area behind the Treatment and Rehab Center of R1MC. Obviously, the collection is continuing in some barangays on a selective basis. 

 Are CENRO and PENRO aware of this? The tons of garbage being dumped there are certainly not segregated. The stench is getting worse.

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SIMILAR SCRIPTS. Note that Mr. Lim had originally asked for a hefty P51-M budget, and later asked for more. So Dagupeños are wont to ask: What for?? Why?? Well, the accounts of neglect in the city are all pointing to a scam that’s much bigger than the sanitary landfill scam of then Mayor Benjie Lim.

Recall that in 2001, Mayor BSL set the stage for a “public demand” to construct a sanitary landfill to replace the dumpsite in Barangay Bonuan Gueset. A picture of the motley group of residents who held up placards “protesting” the continued operation of the dumpsite became the only argument for it, the stage was set.

As Mr. BSL’s efficient sidekick, my friend Tony Uy knew too well what was going on. Mr. Jose Mariano Cuña was tapped to have his name appear as the buyer of the 30-hectare in Barangay Awai in San Jacinto from the original owner then turned around to be the seller to the city government. To cut to the chase, the city government was hoodwinked into paying P16-M for the property that the city never got to own.

I can’t help but suspect that the circumstances we are seeing today have been set up to compel the Mr. Brian Lim to cough up P70-M to solve the garbage crisis. From closing the dumpsite to failure of unsegregated wastes and piling of garbage in the city.

Mayor BSL spent P16-M of city funds for an imagined garbage crisis. Today, Dagupeños are about see the city government spend P70-M for an engineered crisis that appears to have the support of PENRO.  We can go into this later as events unfold in this crisis.Meanwhile, I keep wondering where Mr. Lim thinks good governance is about spending for something when there is an option for the city not to spend anything. I wonder where he learned such governance… in International Jayceeism?  Tsk-tsk.

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