PEIA president Antonio Tria said the review fee being imposed by the Department of Environment and Natural Resources (DENR) is "illegal since the EIS Law does not authorize the imposition of fees for the review."
Tria clarified that the amount is used to pay the honorarium of consultants taken by the Environment Management Bureau (EMB) to review the submitted EIS.
He stressed that under the law, the EMB is supposed to evaluate the EIS and make the recommendation to the secretary for the issuance of the Environmental Compliance Certificate (ECC).
"Under existing practices, where the EMB hires outside consultants to review the EIS and pays them out of the amount deposited by the project proponent, it is in effect the proponent who pays the consultant to evaluate its own EIS," said Tria, an environmental lawyer and former DENR undersecretary.
He added that it is the EMB that determines the amount to be deposited, from P100,000 to P300,000 depending on the project.
Under the existing laws and regulations, a project that is environmentally critical or located in an environmentally critical area must secure an ECC from the DENR before start of development. Development without an ECC will result in its stoppage, plus a fine of not less than P50,000.
Tria explained that the purpose of farming out the review of submitted EIS to outside consultants is to expedite their evaluation and eventual issuance of the ECC so that project development is not unduly delayed.
"The present practice, however, does not serve the purpose. In fact, it causes further delays in the project implementation since it takes more than one year for the EMB to review an EIS and even longer to secure an ECC," he said.
The PEIA pointed out that there is a need to re-evaluate the process and "do away with the imposition of the review fee."