After a rather long period of procrastination, I finally found a will to check some boxes that were soaked in floodwaters weeks ago. There were items that were irretrievable from their junk condition. With unspeakable sadness, I just had to pack them as garbage for final disposal in a small landfill-like portion of my property in a mountain barangay. But, I was happy to discover that some Betamax tapes remained in good condition. I played the movie “Fatal Attraction.”
The plot of the movie was about a happily-married New York lawyer who had a weekend affair with a lovely book editor. For the attorney, it was just a casual weekend tryst but the woman developed an intense, unstable emotional attachment to him. The New Yorker tried everything to cut off contact with the editor but the latter who was totally obsessed with the former, became psychotic, and her behavior led to a fatal end.
Cebu City seemed to be also totally obsessed and fatally attracted to the concept of disposing its garbage in a landfill, the one that it does not own. After the city closed its Inayawan open garbage dumpsite years ago, it did not want to establish a world-standard landfill like that of Bayawan City in Negros Oriental. It instead opted to allocate hundreds of millions of pesos to deposit its refuse in a privately-owned landfill.
I heard critics claiming the arrangement to involve a kind of sweetheart deal not unlike the lawyer-editor fling in Fatal Attraction. Cebu City residents did not know that the last depositary of their garbage in Binaliw was both unsanitary and unsafe. After all, it was found out to be just like the Inayawan open dumpsite although sanitized with a healthy-sounding name. When disaster over took the garbage disposal arrangement, the city leadership reversed the plot of the 1987 film. The city continued to be obsessed with landfill/garbage dumpsite that it literally went around the island to find such place. Dangling millions of city taxpayers’ money, it cavorted with the landfill in Consolacion, Talisay City, Minglanilla, and Aloguinsan.
Former Cebu City mayor Ronald Duterte, a doctor of Civil Law from Universidad de Madrid in Spain, envisioned of establishing a landfill to approximate the highest world standards of his time. This was when the Inayawan dump site was still fully operating. One morning, after we had coffee at his Babag mountain resort, he pointed to me an area where to build the “modern landfill”. In my recollection, it was a valley below Babag where the edges of Kalunasan, Guadalupe, Busay, and Lahug met. Estimatedly, the area should be bigger than Bayawan City’s 21-hectare landfill.
The place cited by Duterte would be in the city’s central area. It would have been a short distance from the South District’s farthest barangay of Tabunok and equally short distance from North District’s farthest barangay Kasambagan. Certainly, it would be much nearer travelling to Aloguinsan.
Duterte’s term began in 1983 when he assumed the mayorship vacated by Dr. Florentino Solon. But it ended in 1986 when President Corazon Aquino took over Malacañang. Mayor Duterte’s Cebu City-owned landfill vision blurred, then it faded and eventually it was lost to the idea of paying someone for a place, people call as landfill, where to put our garbage.
Beth, the editor who had a fatal attraction with the lawyer, was eventually killed. I hope our city leadership will also kill their attraction for leasing a landfill somewhere and rather build for our city a solid waste disposal facility that will help make our city proud.