Will Manilans fight La Mesa housing?

Environmentalists take their case to the public first before the courts. So they kicked off yesterday a signature drive against a housing plan inside La Mesa Dam forest. Then came a flurry of suggestions to legally block the likely contamination of Greater Manila’s main water supply.

Ideas ranged from congressional lobbying to judicial injunction and executive fiat. All require public action just the same. Will 14 million people who draw water from La Mesa reservoir rise as one against 1,411 families who will erect homes in the protected park? This is a test case for Filipinos who casually neglect nature – until too late to avert disasters like killer floods in Ormoc, mudslides in St. Bernard and Infanta, mine poisons in Marinduque, oil spills in Semirara, and trash-slide in Payatas.

Bantay Kalikasan’s Gina Lopez led conservation groups in explaining La Mesa’s dilemma. The Metropolitan Waterworks and Sewerage System must comply with a Supreme Court ruling to cede 58 hectares of watershed to employees. Yet MWSS must also guard Manila and suburb’s water stock. More so since the UP National Hydraulic Research Center warns of canal waste and heavy metal pollution. La Mesa is the water pond of the country’s nerve center, Lopez said. If its safety is compromised, then most likely too would be the 378 other watersheds nationwide.

The tiff traces back to 1968, when two workers’ unions won housing rights from the then-National Waterworks and Sewerage Authority. A 58-hectare lot near Ipo Dam in San Jose del Monte, Bulacan, downstream from and outside La Mesa forest, was raffled off to 1,411 employees. Three years later the unions petitioned the Supreme Court to prod NWSA into signing the deed of sale. The Tribunal so ruled with finality in 1975. The next year, however, then-President Ferdinand Marcos ordered the use of the land as a new filtration plant in lieu of the decrepit one in Montalban, Rizal. A succession of MWSS officers sought an alternative housing site. In 1989 they identified a similar 58-hectare tract, this time upstream from the reservoir and inside the watershed. It straddles the forest’s perimeter fence along Quirino Highway in Novaliches, near the boundary of Quezon and Caloocan cities.

The 1993 officers couldn’t bring themselves to allow the razing of the forest. It wasn’t worth the environmental ruin for lots at a mere P5.50 per square meter in a zone that by then had progressed to fetch P2,000. They asked the justice department for help. The latter opined that it was all up to the homebuyers to secure an environment compliance certificate from the natural resources department.

Still another set of officers in 2004 commissioned the UP study. To make the reservoir partially safe from the housing, the Hydraulic Center said the flood drains and sewers must flow through Amparo Village across the highway. It couldn’t find solutions though for heavy metals that foul up the groundwater in any housing site. If such lethal particles contaminate the dam – which it can within a month of laying down the first structural foundation – MWSS would have to move in more clean-water stocks from Angat Dam. This would deprive Central Luzon farmers of irrigation. The problem was bigger than they thought.

This is where a combination of congressional, executive and judicial actions can come in, assuming that Greater Manilans wish to protect nature – and themselves – for a change.

Concerned folk can write their legislators. Senate President Franklin Drilon, Senators Francis Pangilinan and Pia Cayetano, and Reps. Nanette Daza, Neric Acosta and Annie Susano already have demonstrated interest in La Mesa by donating pork funds to replant the 2,000-hectare forest and rehabilitate the 33-hectare eco-park. A joint resolution of the Senate and House against the housing grant would have the force of law, especially if sponsored by legislators from Metro Manila and Central and Southern Luzon.

For good measure, health-minded lawyers can take the case back to the Supreme Court. A principle in law holds that judicial rulings may be reversed on the strength of new discoveries that may affect public health and safety.

The executive branch, specifically the environment and the local government departments, may also withhold action on the environment compliance certificate until the residents outside the forest are consulted. Notably, residents of sprawling Amparo Village must first be informed of and consent to the pass-through of flood drains and sewer pipes through their zone. Officials of Quezon and Caloocan cities can also first study the MWSS housing’s impact on their locales.

In the end, the environmentalists stressed that they are not against the housing project. The MWSS employees deserve dwellings of their own in exchange for devoting their productive years to the waterworks.

But then, two questions arise: Are the 1,411 lot awardees from 38 years ago still the same ones who will build the homes inside the forest? Too, why did they refuse the MWSS offer to take instead land twice the size in Antipolo City, where Lopez said she assured the building of schools and laying down of sanitation facilities? * * * E-mail: [email protected]