WHOSE JOB IS IT?

SOMETHING SMELLS!

Whose Job Is it?

By Alan S. Gensoli

Under a cloak of darkness, a tricycle driver chugs along Lacson St. at two o’clock in the morning with his load of garbage. He stops in a dark area and dumps the trash by the roadside. This story is real. Worse, it has become habit. It has become culture. 

Solid Waste Management (SWM) should be a way of life. But in a society where hygiene seems not part of daily vocabulary, SWM has to be taught as a discipline. Whose job is it to implement SWM, the city or the barangay’s? 

Republic Act 9003, the legal bible of SWM in the country, clarifies that the barangays have a critical role to play in the implementation of SWM because garbage segregation must take place at source, meaning, in the households in the barangays. BUT: Accountability to the national law for failure of implementation remains the yoke of the city. The first paragraph of Chapter 2, Sec. 10 of R.A. 9003 states in part: “Pursuant to the relevant provisions of R.A. No. 7160, otherwise known as the Local Government Code, the LGUs shall be primarily responsible for the implementation and enforcement of the provisions of this Act....” (referring of course to the Ecological Solid Waste Management Act of 2000, or R.A. 9003). For this reason, every city and municipality is required by law to create a Solid Waste Management Board, with the Mayor sitting as Chairman. Logic would have it that if the law wished to exempt the city from culpability, then there should be no need for such a board. But there is. 

Bacolod City Ordinance 310, or the Revised Ecological Solid Waste Management Ordinance of Bacolod City, passed into law in 2002, re-interprets the national law for this community. However, I believe it has over-interpreted the national law. It seems that the City Ordinance delegated too much responsibility to the barangays, much more that what R.A. 9003 suggests. Consider the matter about the appropriation of SWM funds. 

Bear with me: Paragraph B of Art. 24, Sec. 2 of the Bacolod City Ordinance 310 states in part: “...the annual appropriation for Solid Waste Management must include provisions for allocations to the barangay local governments to enable them to pursue and implement their mandate under R.A. 9003 and its 

Implementing Rules as well as under this ordinance. How much these allocations shall be, shall depend on availability of funds....” What does this mean? SWM can proceed only when city hall has money to spare? It certainly sounds so, but that is not so under the national law. 

Bear with me some more: The second paragraph of Letter L, Sec. 4 of Rule VI, of the IRR of R.A. 9003, states that local solid waste management boards shall “assist barangays in their solid waste management, where the barangay cannot financially or adequately manage all waste segregation, sorting, recovery, recycling, and composting....” The national law is efficient this way, providing a caveat so that SWM will be implemented at all cost, that in the event that the barangay cannot afford to implement it, the LGU must implement it. Now then, the buck stops at city hall. 

Notwithstanding the national law, our local government has taken refuge in City Ordinance 310 by allocating spare change: P3 Million to be divided among all 61 barangays. When you hear about government appropriating P50 Million for furniture, P3 Million is loose change. Don’t get me wrong: I will not mind sitting on a Louis XIV armchair while I wait my turn at the new government center, for so long as this city is clean, green, flood-free, healthy, and practicing SWM. I think that’s fair enough. 

The way the P3 Million is divided among the barangays also requires examination. Out of our 61 barangays, 41 are so-called urban barangays. They are located around the center of the city, and are known simply as Brgy. 1, 2, 3, until 41. By some mathematical magic, they’re the ones receiving the lowest appropriations, as if to say that these barangays are cleaner and so they need less SWM money. Have you seen the garbage in their esteros? Some of these urban barangays are getting as low as P1,000 each month as SWM allocation from the city government. What can a barangay captain do with P1,000? Recycle it? I say, refuse it. 

I pay particular attention to the appropriation of funds because money is key to the success of SWM. The process of educating the citizenry, the creation and distribution of information, education, and communication materials, the building of Material Recovery Facilities in barangays, the building of the sanitary landfill, among many others, require money, money that only the city government has. And money that the national law requires local governments to give.*