Wenceslao: Expensive solutions

NOW the Cebu City Government wants to buy compactor trucks, supposedly to reduce its budget for garbage disposal. This is one move that again proves how bankrupt the city government is of creative ideas on solid waste management. More than that is the lack of long-term planning. But didn’t Mayor Tomas Osmeña claim when he was younger to be forward-looking as far as running City Hall is concerned?

In the end, this is not even solely about compactor trucks. The city does not have a sanitary landfill after the Inayawan facility got filled up. If the mayor was forward-looking, he would already have laid down the plan to build another sanitary landfill years before the Inayawan facility got full. He could have availed even at that time of advanced technology on garbage disposal.

Instead, the mayor got obsessed with the South Road Properties (SRP) and on his effort to retain control of City Hall that he forgot to deal with one of the more important services of all. The result: City Hall is reduced to renting garbage trucks and paying for their disposal to a landfill outside of the city—a costly endeavor resulting from, yes, the lack of foresight.

I covered the City Hall beat in the early ‘90s for radio station dyLA. Osmeña was a young mayor at the time bringing with him the idealism of an outsider who lived in the United States while his late father Serging was forced into exile by the dictatorship of Ferdinand Marcos. He was very eager to lead the city at that time and it showed. That was when creative ideas flowed in his governance style.

The Inayawan Sanitary Landfill was a component of the Metro Cebu Development Project (MCDP) that was funded by Japanese yen loans. The MCDP was as forward-looking as one would hope for, seeing Metro Cebu’s economic growth even before it grew. Those wide roads, the Cebu South Bus Terminal and many other projects—those were products of experts contributing ideas in governance.

I don’t know when was the last time Osmeña last solicited the help of experts in governing the city. He has even refused to listen to the advice for the SRP to be managed by people more knowledgeable on development planning than him. Now, all the plans for the SRP are in the mayor’s head. It is only him who decides on everything SRP. When former mayor Michael Rama did that, Osmeña’s resentment showed.

Cebu City’s solid waste management plan, too, is very Osmeña-centric. There is actually no long-term planning for it; what pops up in the mayor’s mind is what the City government will do. Reopen the Inayawan dump site. Close it. Rent dump trucks. Hire a firm to collect the garbage for a fee. This has been one hell of a ride for the city’s constituents as far as garbage disposal is concerned.

I think we need to do things differently. We need to put a stop to the reactionary governance style and instead craft a long-term and creative plan for the city’s garbage disposal. And everything, including the purchase of compactor trucks, should follow that long-term plan. When governance is merely reacting to problems that crop up, that’s when the solutions provided gets expensive.

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