DRAWING flak for his conspicuous absence at the House committee inquiry on the controversial bioethanol plant project, Cagayan de Oro Councilor Ian Acenas said he was attending “equally important” engagements and that he was not aware of it in the first place.

Members of the City Council’s minority bloc quickly pounced on the non attendance of all administration officials during Thursday’s inquiry initiated by the House ecology committee, branding it “brazen” and “insensitive.”

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Neither Councilor Acenas, who heads the environment committee, nor any of his pro-administration colleagues in the City Council attended the first public hearing on the project held inside the regional office of the Department of Environment and Natural Resources (DENR)-Northern Mindanao.

“What’s stake here is the future of our river, our environment. The House committee flew over here just to listen to the sentiments of the people, but they (administration officials) brazenly ignored it,” said Councilor Roger Abaday, who, along with two other members of the minority bloc, attended the hearing.

It was Acenas’ committee which looked into a land reclassification measure that paved way for the conversion of at least 24-hectare agricultural areas in barangays Mambuaya and Bayanga into an agro-industrial zone. The reclassified land straddling the two upland barangays would later become the proposed site for the P2 billion cassava processing plant of Alsons Consolidated Resources Inc. (Alsons) -- a project that also got a separate nod from the City Council.

Representative Rufus Rodriguez (2nd district), author of the House resolution seeking the inquiry, described the non-attendance of City Hall officials “unfortunate.”

The bioethanol project, he said, bears significance to the environment as its proposed site lies within the city’s watershed area, threatening Cagayan de Oro River and its environs with wastes that the plant may discharge once it starts operation.

But Acenas maintained that neither he nor his colleagues in the environment committee were invited in the public hearing.

On top of this, he said he was also at “equally important” activities attending two culmination rites for the graduation ceremonies of farmers who finished short course on livestock production in three barangays.

But DENR-Northern Mindanao Executive Director Ernesto Adobo said there was no need to put out written invitations to local officials, noting that even Archbishop Antonio Ledesma had "invited himself to the public hearing."

"There's no need for invitations...environment is a concern for all," Dir. Adobo told dxCC-RMN in an interview Friday.

Councilor Teodulfo Lao, meanwhile, found Acenas’ reasons “too flimsy.”

“Which is true? That he (Acenas) knew of the meeting but didn’t come because he was not invited? Or that he knew of the meeting but he was attending to equally important activities?” Lao asked.

“What I see here are alibis that are too flimsy even a child can tell,” Lao said, adding that it was incumbent upon public officials -- opposition or pro administration -- to “work together” on big-ticket issues such as environment rather than “appreciate things according to their political context.”

But the councilor sees more politics in City Hall’s “wholesale snub” of the House-led public hearing.

“It is possible they’re afraid of their questionable act of re-classifying a purely agricultural area overnight,” Lao said, referring to a 2007 ordinance that reclassified the plant’s proposed location.

The Kagay-an Watershed Alliance (Kawal) called the passage of the ordinance “highly suspicious” and “irregular.” It noted that the measure was enacted without complying “with the technical and social requirements for such revision including a public hearing.”

During the hearing, Kawal and other groups opposed to the plant’s location reiterated that the project cannot continue because its site lies “at the heart of the city’s watershed zone and is a “high conservation value landscape.”

“The proposed location serves as habitat of endemic and endangered animal species vulnerable to coal heating, polluted waters, toxic fumes and foul odor, i.e. tarsiers, Brahminny kites and other local birds and fishes,” Kawal said in a statement.

For its part, Alsons representatives maintained that its “zero waste technology” would eliminate concerns raised by Kawal and other opponents of the project’s location.

However, DENR-Northern Mindanao had earlier shelved the Environmental Compliance Certificate (ECC) application of Alsons because the firm failed to sufficiently demonstrate that its “zero waste” technology could work.