Rubbish

Poor Quezon City residents. Like the rest of their countrymen, they had to end 2013 with the specter of higher rates in electricity, social security and healthcare. Meralco’s steep rate hike, thankfully, is under judicial review, and the announced increases in Social Security System and PhilHealth contributions are generating fierce debate and opposition. As it is, Filipinos already pay a host of taxes on everything, from income to property to inheritance, to the purchase of the most essential goods via the ubiquitous value-added tax.

The wise aldermen of the wealthiest city in the country, however, are not content with those burdensome-enough impositions on their constituents. One of them, Councilor Victor Ferrer Jr. of Quezon City’s first district, introduced an ordinance requiring homeowners to pay an annual fee for garbage collection. The wonder is not so much that such an ordinance was introduced—sillier ideas have come from politicians right and left—as that it was eventually approved and signed into law by Mayor Herbert Bautista last Dec. 26, apparently with little to no objections from other councilmen in City Hall.

Can anything be more basic a government service than trash collection? Public health and sanitation is a task on the same level as law and order—something so fundamental that, even as some governments have devolved the physical function of collecting and disposing of garbage to private companies, the supervision and oversight of such service remain with the state.

That service is a core task of the government, and as such is assumed to be automatically funded by the array of taxes already levied on citizens. It is not, certainly, an add-on service, a superfluity the city could do without—unless the Quezon City government, in this case, thinks it is running an upscale high-rise condominium where the homeowners’ association could vote at anytime to impose additional fees on its members.

Even wealthy condominium owners, in fact, would balk at the idea of paying the additional fees if their association dues already covered garbage disposal. Quezon City happens to be, as its website attests, the richest in the country in terms of revenue—yes, richer even than ritzy Makati. Quezon City’s gross revenue collection for 2012 was P13.69 billion, as against the P11.37 billion reported by Makati. The city government has not been shy about this fact, trumpeting it as proof not only that Quezon City is a first-rate urban center, but also that it has a first-rate government behind its success.

But if the city is awash in cash—because it says it runs a highly efficient, aboveboard organization when it comes to revenue and the people’s money—then what does it need the additional money for? The new annual garbage fees, said Bautista, are expected to generate between

P50 million and P60 million every year, which would then fund the city’s environmental projects such as urban reforestation, waterway cleanup operations, and disaster risk reduction and management.

These are crucial projects—but why must they be funded by extracting more from already hard-up citizens whose taxes across the board have already made their city the most affluent and profitable in the country?

A public consultation about the proposed ordinance was said to have been held in November, but one of those invited, businessman John Chang, said only a handful of residents showed up, and the meeting held in a mall was obviously a mere “formality.” That appears to be so, because the haste with which the city council and Bautista signed off on the law suggests that catching the public off-guard and having it accept the new imposition as a fait accompli was the battle plan for the ordinance’s approval all along.

Bautista, Ferrer, et al. may cite lofty reasons for this new tax, but its arbitrary nature cannot be papered over. If something as fundamental as garbage collection can now be “taxed” separately, over and above the other requisite fees ordinary citizens have to pay the government, then what’s to stop the Quezon City government from levying payments next for, say, assigning more police presence to a particular area? Or installing new street lights? Or repairing busted pipes, putting out fires, managing traffic, saving people from floods and disasters?

“If P100 to P500 is paid on an annual basis, I do not think it will be a big burden,” said Bautista. He misses the point. His constituents can always use the spare cash. But more than that, his government should learn to manage the people’s money better, so it can lay off from squeezing them for more.