BAGUIO CITY – Mayor Mauricio G. Domogan ordered the City General Services Office (GSO) to prepare the waste disposal contract for the transfer of the dumpsite of the city’s residual waste from the Metro Clark Management and Sanitary Services Corporation in Capas, Tarlac to the sanitary landfill owned by the local government of Urdaneta in Pangasinan starting next year.
The local chief executive claimed the city’s technical team was able to validate the compliance of the Urdaneta landfill operator to the pertinent permits issued by concerned government agencies that will support the requirements of the procurement law, relative to the compliance of landfill operators to the standards contained under the provisions of Republic Act (RA) 9003, or the Ecological Solid Waste Management Act.
Earlier, Metro Clark management informed the local government that it intends to increase the tipping fee it is collecting from the city’s residual waste being dumped in its facility from the current P550 per ton to P650 per ton starting January 2018.
However, the operator of the Urdaneta sanitary landfill offered to the local government that it will maintain the tipping fee from the residual waste to be dumped in its facility, which will be P550.
Domogan explained that aside from the savings generated with the maintained tipping fee, the local government stands to benefit from the hauling cost. It is currently pegged at P945 per ton considering that travel from Baguio City to the Urdaneta landfill is 104 kilometers shorter than the travel to the Capas landfill site.
“We have to make sure that we will keep our hauling cost to the greater advantage of the local government so that it will not affect our budget projections next year while we are setting our sights on the long-term solutions to our garbage disposal problem which will be the put up of the integrated solid waste disposal facility either in the Antamok open pit site or in the city-owned property in Sto. Tomas School Area,” Domogan stressed.
He said one of the things that should be addressed by the Urdaneta landfill operator is for the facility to operate on a 24-hour basis so there will be a guarantee that the city hauler’s trucks will be able to dump the city’s residual waste once the delivery will be done late at night or even during the earlys hours of the morning.
The local government has allocated some P75 to 85 million annually for over a decade now primarily for the hauling of the city’s residual waste to the accredited sanitary landfills in the lowlands.
When the local government started hauling out the city’s residual waste in 2008, the hauling cost and the tipping fee per ton of garbage was at over P3,400 but Domogan was able to facilitate continuously lowering cost every ton of garbage to as low as less than P1,500 per ton to date. He underscored that the local government is not actually abandoning the establishment of the city’s integrated solid waste disposal facility, which is a far more permanent solution to the city’s garbage disposal problem. /By Dexter A. See
