Stinky Payatas needs attention, not Forbes - Gotcha

Is MMDA chief Jejomar Binay squeezing himself where he's not wanted, yet not acting where he's needed?

Forbes Park residents say Binay is the political force driving to reclassify their McKinley Road from residential to commercial zone. They had voted thrice in 1997 against the move, yet Binay's men in Makati's city council still want to ram it down their throat. They belie claims that rezoning would lessen pollution, for it would surely increase traffic -- the cause of 75 percent of Metro Manila's dirty air. So they want Binay out.

Across the metropolis in Quezon City, meanwhile, residents of 27 middle-class subdivisions along Commonwealth Avenue are begging for MMDA action on Payatas garbage dump. The open dump -- not a sanitary landfill like in San Mateo, Rizal or Carmona, Cavite -- is spreading respiratory diseases to a million citizens. Garbage trucks cause traffic, collide nightly with motorists, and litter the national road with heaps of trash. Like Smokey Mountain in Manila before it, Payatas also attracts squatters who scavenge for food or recyclable gadgets.

About half-a-million squatters from the Visayas live in the area bigger than Pasay City. Passengers of ships from the Visayas that berth in Manila harbors invariably ask cabbies to be driven there.

Health officials claim they spray the dump with chemicals to prevent disease from spreading. Yet the dump stinks, depending on which way the wind blows, all the way to Tandang Sora six miles south and to Fairview six miles north. Some days, the stink permeates into the Batasang Pambansa where the House of Representatives meets each day, and the Sandiganbayan and Commission on Audit headquarters.

MMDA had promised to close the dump more than ten years ago. The first cornerstone of a development plan, like Smokey Mountain's, has yet to be laid to this day.

The middle-class residents -- businessmen and professionals, government officials and employees -- are crying for help because their property values are dropping. Before multinational companies began uprooting because of the deteriorating quality of life in the metropolis, the residents already were complaining. They had passed through the eye of the needle to buy homelots for P5,000 per sq m and build million-peso houses for which they pay real estate taxes -- only to be neglected.

TNT-Philippines is not pulling out of Manila, general manager Jose Luis Romero-Salas wrote to clarify Gotcha, 19 Feb. 2000. The impression of a TNT pullout arose from last year's closure of its Asian hub. Said Salas:

TNT has no intention to sell off anything, lay off workers or terminate contracts except those that have to be done in the regular course of business. Our business in RP has grown over the years; we project continued robust growth this and incoming years. We plan to make more investments by expanding operations.

Closure of our Asian air network hub in RP last year was due to onerous new financial terms of the agreement proposed by our partner. Accepting the terms would have made continued operations unviable. We closed the hub and went back to using regular commercial planes.

Organizers can speculate on a number of reasons why Joseph Estrada didn't join Friday afternoon's EDSA celebration. There's the report that El Shaddai's Mike Velarde warned that radicals would embarrass him with placards proclaiming, "You weren't here in '86" or "We brought down a tyrant, we can do it again." There's talk that demonstrators were ready to pelt him with rotten tomatoes. There are murmurs that Estrada didn't want to sit through a homily by Cardinal Jaime Sin who, only the day before, had said that the EDSA spirit and the administration's grant of gambling concessions don't mix. And there were radio clips that he already felt uncomfortable that morning standing between old presidents and new critics Cory Aquino and Fidel Ramos.

But an aide said Estrada woke up that day to irritating news reports of a survey that showed him losing two-to-one in mock elections against Vice President Gloria Macapagal or Sen. Raul Roco. He also got word that Bicol radio commentators were criticizing him for cancelling his visit to Mayon Volcano evacuees the day before. If Macapagal had made it, the commentators were sneering, why couldn't the President?

Macapagal's commercial flight to Legazpi was cancelled just 30 minutes before takeoff, yet she took a private jet to Naga and rode an hour by car to the evacuation center Thursday. Radio men commented, "Kung nais, may paraan; kung ayaw, may dahilan." So there.

INTERACTION. Eli Garnace, bellatlantic.net: Your observation of Erap as a hands-off manager (Gotcha, 23 Feb. 2000) is so straight to the point that I now understand why you're in his 3-D list. I hope more people will realize that we deserve a better President.

Ramon Sagullo, Quezon: How could you! Can't you see Erap has his hands full with a goblet of his favorite red wine and caressing his many...

...Hold it right there, Mon, you want to land in the 3-D list, too?

Manuel Espaldon, Ayala-Alabang: Does Erap think foreign investors are hesitant to come in or are pulling out because they cannot own land?

Mar Tajon, QC: Drug busts by the hundreds of kilos and millions of pesos are reported each day, but the supply seems inexhaustible. Erap has given many angry statements about drugs' effects on the youth, but nothing impressive has been done to curb the trade. Could well-connected persons be redistributing the confiscated drugs?

Rudy Azurin, trosnet.com: It's disgusting for Barican to justify OFWs because their special skills supposedly are needed in their host-countries. Most OFWs like me would not leave RP to work as slaves in a strange land if there were jobs back home.

But he wants to be an OFW too, Rudy, as ambassador to the U.N.

Thank you, Benjie Alvarez of BF-Paranaque, Manny Geslani, Ben Simpao, Jonathan Navarro, Jose B. Sala.

YOUR BODY. Uh-oh, researchers now say estrogen isn't so effective to treat Alzheimer's disease in women. A study in Journal of the American Medical Association quotes disappointed scientists as saying past studies were too small, thus misleading them that estrogen slows the onset of symptoms like memory loss.

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