EXPECT to pay a little bit more for the food you eat at restaurants, for movies at the city’s malls, or for hotel rooms.
At the urging of the City Local Environment and Natural Resources Office (Clenro), the Cagayan de Oro Chamber of Commerce and Industry Foundation, Inc. (Oro Chamber) is creating a group to address the disposal of wastes generated by their establishments.
Lady Mae Gumanid, executive secretary of Oro Chamber, said the Oro Chamber came up with the measure after being told by Clenro that the city can no longer cope with the sheer volume of wastes it needs to collect and dispose of after the City Council slashed the budget for garbage collection.
Gumahid said big business establishments in the city at present already collect their own garbage as part of their corporate social responsibility initiatives.
But Gumahid said the present measures are not enough as big establishments generate huge amounts of trash.
Gumahid said among the tasks the group will have to address is how to spread the costs of hiring additional dump trucks which will be used to collect and dispose of the garbage.
The group will be composed of 10 members representing malls, hotels, and restaurants.
Clenro chief Edwin Dael, meanwhile, said the P60 million budget for garbage collection this year will pay only for the collection of about 15,000 cubic meters of garbage per month.
On average, Dael said the city generates about 27,000 cubic meters of trash per month.
The City has a garbage hauling contract with IPM Construction and Development Corporation priced at P348.52 per cubic meter.
“With the current budget, the city can only afford to pay the garbage hauling contractor P5.5 million per month,” Dael said.
“Let’s say the city averages only 20,000 cubic meters, there would still be 5,000 cubic meters left,” he said.
Dael said they initially proposed P72 million budget for the year which would have been enough to haul all the garbage to the city’s dump site.
Dael said the budget for garbage collection during the previous administration was about P6 million per month but even then, the budget was not enough to pay the contractor since payment depended on the actual volume of garbage collected.
Dael said about two or three weeks after he assumed office in July 2013, he was told by the past garbage hauling contractor to request for a supplemental budget because the annual budget only covered garbage collection until August 2013.
“We ended up paying P20 million more, making the payment for the whole year of 2013 P80 million,” Dael said.