Editorial
Where to, garbage of Dagupan?
NOT an enviable job, that of Teddy Villamil, officer-in-charge of the Waste Management Division of Dagupan. As the commercial and educational center of the province, the coastal city is a bustling urban area where tons of garbage are expectedly generated. It has its successes in some of the 31 barangays in terms of the implementation of policies on waste segregation at source, but the bigger problem is the city does not have a sanitary landfill as required of all local governments under the law. The existing dumpsite, meanwhile, is perennially under risk of spilling over.
That is perhaps why Villamil takes on every opportunity to reduce the volume of garbage at the dumpsite, even if it means breaking the law. And that is exactly what happened when Villamil consented to the transferring of garbage from the dumpsite to two private lots because the owners thought it a bright idea to use rubbish as filling material. Villamil did not have second thoughts about the proposition because, by his own admission, it was something that the city has done before — moving tons of garbage extracted from the dumpsite, in 2006 under the administration of incumbent Mayor Benjamin Lim, to the lot of businessman George Li near a river in San Jacinto. This time around, however, residents have filed a complaint because the waste filling is not only polluting the air with its obnoxious smell but seepage is also threatening nearby agricultural and aquaculture properties, not to mention the potential health risks to people in the neighborhood. An official of the Department of Environment and Natural Resources has given his verdict: the city is liable for this brouhaha. And the city now has to shell out a precious P230,000 to get the garbage out and take it back to the dumpsite, not that the lot owner wants his now levelled plot of land to be touched.
The whole ruckus again brings to the fore the long unresolved issue of the Awai land in San Jacinto that Lim negotiated to buy for an overpriced value of P16 million, supposedly for the city’s sanitary landfill. There is plenty of trash lying around that the city government is liable for, and some major cleaning is called for.
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Rape
BECAUSE Justice Secretary Leila de Lima and Foreign Affairs Undersecretary Rafael Seguis said he had diplomatic immunity, a Panamanian diplomat escaped a rape prosecution.
Erich Bairnals Shcks (pronounced “shehk”), who was accused of raping a 19-year-old Filipino woman on April 23, left the country on May 11 when De Lima and Seguis certified that he had diplomatic immunity.
In a May 17 Senate hearing on the matter, with the rape victim and her lawyer present, Sen. Tito Sotto said: “What you just did makes me shudder, and every Filipino watching us shudder. That means that a diplomat can do anything. Rape is not a function (of a diplomat).” The victim’s lawyer, DJ Jimenez, said, “…The victim was hoping the government is the first to protect her…With the swift and overly diplomatic actions of the DFA and DOJ…it would really appear that it is our government who lawyered for Mr. Shks.”
Indeed, only in the Philippines.
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