Reviewing MMDA laws on garbage

Have you noticed how junk vehicles or appliances left by owners on roadsides fronting their homes or shops cause traffic? Or how store owners impede pedestrians by leaving their stocks on sidewalks? Or how builders dump sand and gravel on roads and sidewalks beside construction sites, causing floods on rainy days?

All those are illegal under two Metro Manila Development Authority ordinances: 96-009 and 99-006. They were passed six and three years ago. Yet nobody seems to be obeying or enforcing them.

MMDA chairman Bayani Fernando wants to change all that. For starters, he is distributing copies of the ordinances to all barangays, which in turn must give copies to homeowners’ associations in their locales. The implication is that he will soon embark on the third stage of restoring order in the streets of the big city, after clearing sidewalks of vendors and parked vehicles.

Ordinance 96-009 prohibits anyone from littering or dumping trash on "open public places," that is, roads and bridges, sidewalks and easements, parks and vacant lots, rivers and canals. Amending ordinance 99-006 differentiates "littering" from "dumping." The first means making a place untidy by carelessly throwing small pieces of of waste, like cigarette butts, candy wrappers, fruit or vegetable peelings. The second is indiscriminate unloading from homes or offices of refuse that is bigger than one cubic foot.

A litterbug can be fined P500, payable within the day at the MMDA treasury service or the city treasurer’s office. If he ignores the citation, he can be charged in court. If found guilty, he must pay double or go to jail for three to seven days. Litterbugs, according to Ordinance 96-009, include those who urinate, defecate or spit in open public places.

A dumper can get it worse: P1,000 fine, payable within three days. A lawsuit also faces those who refuse, with double penalty if found guilty or imprisonment of one week to one month. That should be fair warning to erring store owners and builders. That goes for hard-headed homeowners, too, who strew their trashbags on roadsides or hang these on trees instead of leaving these on front sidewalks or driveways for the garbageman to pick up on collection days.

Those who leave junk are considered dumpers. A violator is given ten days from serving of notice to remove his car or appliance from the road. If he doesn’t, the MMDA may tow or haul it away for auction to defray the cleanup cost.

The unheeded citations and court records of litterbugs and dumpers will go to the NBI, city police and barangay office. Job or visa applicants will find it embarrassing for potential employers and consuls to discover how they live like pigs.

Ordinance 96-009 has other provisions for health and sanitation. It requires owners and renters of houses and offices, and administrators of commercial buildings, dorms, schools and churches everyday to sweep and clean the surrounding streets, sidewalks and vacant lots.

Operators and drivers of public utility vehicles must keep their buses, jeepneys, taxicabs and tricycles clean, and provide for modest trash receptacles in the vehicles. Tankers, garbage trucks and haulers may not spill any litter on the road on the way to their destinations.

Owners, renters or administrators of public or private residential or or commercial buildings must also provide for trash bins in their premises. MMDA sanitation enforcers may inspect the buildings any day from 7 a.m. to 5 p.m. to ascertain compliance.

It is unlawful for any individual or group to collect garbage from homes or offices for a fee, unless this is authorized by the barangay or the homeowners’ association for livelihood projects that promote waste reduction, segregation, composting and recycling.

No one may paste or nail signboards, posters, advertising billboards or streamers on any part of the road, sidewalk, medians, streetposts, trees parks and open spaces.

With such ordinances largely ignored, every other Metro Manilan seems to be a violator. It would take a massive change of lifestyles and habits to make them conscious of cleanliness. Thus, Fernando is thinking of mobilizing the thousands of barangay officials to lead the drive. After all, the Solid Waste Management Act requires them to serve as frontline enforcers.

Barangay officials will be tasked to accost litterbugs and dumpers among their constituents. The idea is to make them accountable for the cleanliness in their locales. "We will take them to task," Fernando said, echoing the threat of his predecessor, now Comelec chairman Benjamin Abalos, to charge slaggards for dereliction of duty. "We have a lot of barangay officials, yet they don’t do anything about the problem."

A number of city mayors and councilors have asked Fernando to deputize the barangay officials as sanitation enforcers. That is, the officials should be given the job of issuing citations for littering and dumping. The problem is politics, though. Violators they will cite are also their voters.

In this country, there’s too much politics in everything, including garbage. Groan!

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Enough already. Losers of last September’s election of the Sangguniang Kabataan national president had better stop questioning the victory of Ariel Joseph Arcillas of Laguna. They never produced any evidence or testimony of Arcillas’ supposed vote-buying, but only jolted the press with their allegations during an impromptu press conference in Malacañang. They even asked President Gloria Arroyo, Senate President Franklin Drilon and Speaker Jose de Venecia to investigate their allegations, even though the Department of Interior and Local Governments already did and found no fraud in the balloting by 88 provincial presidents. They based their allegations solely on an unsigned manifesto that is no different from a scandal sheet which they themselves probably wrote. Very trapo of them.

Arcillas has admitted to bringing boxes of buko pie and bunches of lanzones to the hotel where the presidents held a three-day leadership seminar before the election. But he said he only wanted to promote Laguna’s products with the delegates, who also brought their own exchange gifts. To insinuate that SK leaders can be bought with pie slices and fruits is to demean the youth. No wonder the olds are shaking their heads, saying the SK is an early training for corruption.

The other allegations simply are preposterous – that Arcillas paid the delegates P50,000 each for their votes, on top of roundtrip plane fares and hotel billeting. That means spending P3 million on the 60 or so delegates who voted for him. Now, why would an SK national presidential aspirant do that?

Arcillas’ dad, a town mayor, did go to the hotel where the SK leaders were holding the seminar. But only on the afternoon of the third day, way past the election. He only wanted to congratulate his son and check out how things were, having received a report that one of the losers had walked out of the election hall yelling at the delegates. It was this sore loser’s dad who was, in fact, present during the balloting. He witnessed his son’s tantrums.

That’s what’s wrong with Philippine politics. The trapos teach the youth, through bad example, that no one ever loses an election, only cheated. Fortunately, the majority of SK provincial presidents don’t believe the losers’ charges.

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Catch Sapol ni Jarius Bondoc, Saturdays at 8 a.m. on DWIZ (882-AM).

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