Vicente Duterte, Acting Mayor of Danao, Cebu

Cebu City’s garbage problem is worsening. I believe many city residents are aware of this. We see mounds of uncollected refuse in many parts of the city. Consequently, our sanitation has deteriorated to dangerous levels. We smell the obnoxious odor and are exposed to health hazards. The multi-million peso contract signed by the administration of Mayor Tomas Osmeña with his political protégé is not working. The city leadership is a total failure in disposing waste. We have not become the city Osmeña promised when he campaigned in 1988, a city second to none.

These past 30 years of Osmeña administration (there were brief spells by mayors Alvin Garcia and Michael Rama), he has failed to address this problem. We hear him discuss hifalutin ideas like the South Reclamation Project and lately giving P1 million to each SK president. These earth-shaking pronouncements were designed to impress us. To his credit, Osmeña is a brilliant propagandist, but if we really scrutinize what he has done for us we will find we have been taken for a ride.

Let me compare what neighboring Talisay City and Bayawan City in Negros Oriental have done regarding trash. This early, I will alert you to disturbing figures indicating the incompetence of Mayor Osmeña vis-a-vis mayors Eduardo Gullas and the late German Sarana.

Talisay City has a working 15-hectare landfill in Barangay Tapul. There, garbage is dumped, processed, and covered with soil. Gullas, whom Osmeña, reportedly a college undergraduate, called names few years back, is trying to make do with the city’s limited resources and budget. In fact, in the infancy of Talisay’s cityhood, Gullas introduced modern mechanized garbage units that Cebu City, under the leadership of an agri-economics student, never had. I have information Gullas is looking for ways to re-introduce such mechanisms with improved systems.

In Bayawan City, its former mayor the late German Sarana, built a landfill on a 21-hectare lot about 10 years ago. Told that the landfill of Manteca in California. USA, was world-class, I visited that facility not very long ago. But, in comparison, the Bayawan City landfill is, by far, superior. Example? Anyone can eat lunch right beside a structure built for human waste without sensing its purpose.

Now, Cebu City. I remember Osmeña, while campaigning for his first term in 1988, boasted to introduce garbage collection patterned after the US where he hid during Martial Law. After being elected, he did not know what the problem was. To cover his cluelessness, he blamed previous administrations. But he did nothing because he seemed not to know anything. Compared to the visionary leadership of Gullas and Sarana, Osmeña, in his incompetence and lack of foresight, allowed the continued dumping of trash at the Inayawan landfill until its inevitable closure. While Talisay and Bayawan cities collect and dispose of garbage in environmentally-friendly landfills, Cebu City allocates millions to hire private corporations to do this, but so much trash remain uncollected. Why? Ask that question to an incompetent mayor.