By Leonardo Micua

 

WITH the initial structure of the One-Bonuan Pavillon in place in Bonuan Binloc, and the construction of the two-story General Douglas Mac Arthur Memorial starting soon, the more than 60-year old garbage dumpsite in Bonuan will now find itself shamefully out of place.

Add this to the provision of solar lighting to the kilometers-long board walk from the BJMP in Bonuan Gueset to the Bureau of Fisheries and Natural Resources complex in Bonuan Binloc, courtesy of the Tourism Infrastructure and Enterprise Authority worked out by Fourth District Congressman Toff de Venecia, the one instrumental in making the board walk a reality.

This could be the reason why Mayor Belen Fernandez is now doing what no other past mayors did in the past – making early morning visits to the dumpsite a daily routine – to check the progress of work of clearing the last mound of garbage at the dumpsite.

Clearing is still a no mean feat with a backhoe is on top of the garbage heap as it furrows and picks up the garbage for loading into waiting dump trucks down below for delivery to the sanitary landfill in Urdaneta City.

To date, much of the dumpsite was already cleared and every square meter cleared is immediately covered by silt churned by dredging machines of the DPWH that are still continuously de-silting the Calmay River, closed to its mouth in Sitio Sabangan in Bonuan Gueset.

Determined to transform the entire dumpsite into a tree park, Fernandez already ordered the City Agriculture Office to commence planting trees in some of the cleared areas, using tree seedlings initially made available by the Community Environment and Natural Resources Office.

According to Mayor Belen, the four dump trucks of the city, three of which are brand new, deliver Dagupan wastes to the Urdaneta sanitary landfill daily. From 18 to 20 truckloads of garbage are already being delivered daily to the landfill sites since these trucks became available in January this year.

This big volume of trash is almost the same volume of garbage generated by households and the city’s public market. However, once segregated, 90 percent of these are compacted and brought to Dagupan City’s partner Holcim Philippines to fuel the manufacture of cement, if not as a component of cement itself.

The remaining 10 percent of the city’s wastes are being pulverized and turned into fertilizers to be distributed free to farmers and households to enrich the soil in their gardens.

If she succeeds in closing the dumpsite, Belen will go down in the history of Dagupan, as the only mayor who was able to do so and turned it into a big tree park to boost eco-tourism development in her city, where all her predecessors failed.

She, however, sighs in deep frustration on recalling how her request for a supplemental budget for the purchase of four dump trucks, a backhoe and a pay loader was blocked since 2022, that prevented the closure of the dumpsite much earlier.

Her request was finally acted upon late in 2024 following the 60-day preventive suspension of three opposition councilors, which Fernandez calls an act of God. The power shift occurred allowed the minority to seize the majority.

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It was only during the time Mayor Belen when the contentious and endless debate on where General Douglas Mac Arthur landed in Pangasinan ended. Still, no mayor was as more zealous as Belen in putting an end to the debate with facts from an American archivist that proved Mac Arthur really landed in Dagupan.

She invited James Zobel, a historian and official archivist of the General Douglas Mac Arthur Memorial, last February 24 to confirm that the Supreme Commander of the Allied Liberation Forces landed at Blue Beach in Dagupan at 2:00 p.m. on January 9, 1945.

And as a result of this confirmation, she is set to build a two-storey  MacArthur Memorial at Tondaligan Park, where the landing actually took place, to perpetuate the memory of MacArthur and thousands of Filipinos and Americans who lost their lives so that the Philippines will again be free. 

Noting that the city has no fund for such a project, Mayor Belen asked Senator Grace Poe to fund the project, who readily approved the release of P60 million from her office for it. 

That’s the mark of a workaholic Dagupan City Chief Executive. 

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