By RACHELLE TAYONG

CAPAS — Obviously racing against time, this town’s anti-landfill mayor has asked the Supreme Court (SC) to immediately decide on the class suit he and around 50 other anti-landfill advocates filed against the Clark Development Corp. (CDC) in a bid to stop the state-owned firm from operating a vast waste facility here.

In his motion to the High Tribunal, Mayor Rey Catacutan said that its decision on the case is a matter of "life and death to the environment and the people of Capas," as he pointed out that the CDC is poised to accept garbage at the newly-constructed 3-hectare landfill facility in the upland Sitio Kalangitan here anytime on September this year.

Also named as respondent in the class suit that was backed by militant groups and several Catholic priests in the province was the German consortium, Ingenieurburo Birkhahn+Nolte Gmbh and Heers Brockstedt Gmbh & Co. KG, which won the 25-year build-operate-transfer (BOT) contract for the controversial, multimillion-dollar sanitary landfill project.

After having been stalled for nearly three years due to popular opposition, construction for the landfill went in full swing last April after Gov. Jose Yap Sr. approved last March 25 a pro-landfill resolution enacted by the provincial board.

It was Yap’s Sama-Sama sa Tarlac (SST) party-mates in the board, led by Vice Gov. Marcelino Aganon Jr., who actually supported the pro-landfill resolution, while board members identified with the administration Lakas-NUCD, who happen to compose the minority, vehemently opposed the project.

Shortly after Yap signed the pro-landfill resolution, the governor’s youngest son, former Victoria vice mayor Victor Yap, was appointed by CDC president, Emmanuel Angeles, as a member of the state-owned firm’s board of directors.

Several conditions were laid down by the provincial board for the landfill’s construction, such as limiting it to only 5 hectares, allowing only garbage from Tarlac and the Clark ecozone to be dumped in the waste facility, opening it to a monitoring team constituted by the Tarlac government for independent inspection, and prioritizing residents from the province for employment.

In the class suit, the anti-landfill advocates however pointed out that the contract between the CDC and the German firm allows the latter to develop exactly 100 hectares of land in Kalangitan for the waste facility.

The BOT agreement does not also specify any limitation on where the garbage that would be dumped in the landfill will come from. Besides, it states that the CDC "guarantees" the German firm 19,800 tons of solid wastes per year, which Catacutan said that the combined garbage from Tarlac and the Clark ecozone would likely not be able to comply with.

If the landfill falls short of the stipulated 19,800 tons of annual solid waste, the BOT contract states that the German firm will collect the difference from the CDC.

With regards the monitoring team, board member Amado de Leon, a party-mate of Yap who then supported the pro-landfill resolution, complained that there are still no signs that it will be organized by the governor "now or in the near future."

As for employment, Catacutan noted that only "twenty percent" of the landfill’s current workforce came from this town, as the rest were reportedly "imported" by the German firm.

He added that residents here who were employed in the waste facility’s construction were merely laborers.