Enforcement, not just cleanup

Refrigerators. That’s what cleanup crews pulled from the Jaro River. Not the odd plastic bag or stray bottle — entire refrigerators, stripped for parts and dumped by junk shops near Tabuc Suba, Jaro in Iloilo City.

Mixed waste packed in sacks, clearly bagged at home and tossed in deliberately. General Services Office (GSO) head Engr. Neil Ravena called it frustrating. He should be furious.

The city recovered about 1.5 tons of garbage from a waterway along the Ticud boundary of Baldoza and Tigum last Saturday — two truckloads, triggered not by routine monitoring but by a photo that went viral. For the year, the total haul is 12 to 15 tons. Ravena estimates the Saturday cleanup barely scratched a quarter of what’s there.

The clock is ticking. The Jaro River runs seven to eight kilometers through 23 barangays across four districts before emptying into the Iloilo Strait. The city’s own Climate and Disaster Risk Assessment classifies 72 barangays as very high risk for flooding, with roughly 240,000 residents potentially affected.

Last July, 88 barangays flooded in a single day, with water reaching 37 inches in Calubihan and Taft North. Tabuc Suba — one of the areas where garbage now piles up — was among them. The rainy season starts in June. That’s maybe 10 weeks away.

But the city keeps framing this as a logistics problem. Ravena talks about regrouping teams, coordinating with the City Environment and Natural Resources Office (CENRO), improving truck access. All necessary. But none of that addresses why the garbage is in the river in the first place.

RA 9003 has been law for 25 years. It prohibits dumping in unauthorized areas, with penalties from fines to imprisonment. Barangays are mandated to organize Ecological Solid Waste Management Committees. So where is the enforcement? How many fines issued for illegal dumping along the Jaro River? How many junk shops cited? As far as anyone can tell, zero.

Engr. Ravena deserves credit for honesty. He commended barangays that installed screening devices along waterways to trap floating waste — a genuinely smart, low-cost intervention. But the fact that this remains voluntary tells you everything about the gap between what the city knows and what it actually demands. Mandatory screening at key tributary entry points would be a start. A monitoring regime for commercial establishments near waterways would be better. Visible enforcement, with publicized citations, would be best.

There’s also the Pavia question. Engr. Ravena acknowledged that waste may be flowing in from upstream barangays in Pavia, Tacas, and Simeon Ledesma. The river’s headwaters at the Tigum-Aganan confluence sit squarely in Pavia’s jurisdiction, which means a purely Iloilo City response will always fall short. The provincial government or the Department of Environment and Natural Resources (DENR) Region 6 needs to convene a shared waterway management agreement. This is basic inter-LGU coordination that should have been in place years ago.

Iloilo City has poured PHP 7.3 billion into flood control projects since 2022, with PHP 2.7 billion more in the pipeline. That investment means nothing if the rivers those projects protect keep getting choked with garbage because nobody enforces the law at the barangay level.

Cleanup operations make for decent photo ops. Enforcement is harder, messier, and politically inconvenient. But that’s the job.