Residents near Baguio dump file charges vs mayor, other officials

BAGUIO CITY , Philippines  – Affected residents in Irisan barangay, site of the five-hectare open dumpsite, are suing Baguio City Mayor Reinaldo Bautista Jr., administrator Peter Fianza and Environment Officer Romeo Concio for the continued dumping of Baguio’s tons and tons of garbage.

Instead of averting more environmental and health disasters they have been suffering for long, the residents stated in their petition for injunction with temporary restraining order, these officials are the ones violating their rights.

The Irisan residents who barricaded the dumpsite last year temporarily stopping the city from further piling up garbage in the dumpsite which should have been closed since 2006 said the city government failed to stand by earlier agreements with the city government to finally close the dump.

On April 1, the residents claimed in their petition before the courts, the city started dumping garbage again at the site sending them into frenzy that the occasional rains are causing the garbage to flow down to residents near the dumpsite and further down Barangay Tadiangan in Tuba town, Benguet. The potable water sources have also been affected, they said.

Even after dialogues that forged agreements that the city government will stop dumping was breached, said George Dumawing lawyer for the petitioners. He was former IBP-Baguio-Benguet chairman, hence the suit against the city officials.

City officials, however, have argued that the dumpsite has been closed but occasionally opened for rehabilitation. Work there, they insist, are rehabilitation work and not dumping.

For more than nine months now since the “closure” of the dump, Baguio’s garbage had been hauled to a private-run sanitary landfill in Tarlac but budgetary constraints have reportedly hampered the hauling.

Unconvinced, residents claim that dumping never ceased posing “an eminent danger of erosion, other environmental and health hazards such as water pollution and diseases.” 

The city mayor and city officials, said Dumawing, “know for a fact that the dumping is a clear violation of Section 37 of RA 9003.”