In an act rare among government officials, Mayor Reinaldo Bautista Jr. appeared at a city council session on Monday and apologized for the garbage crisis that kept the country’s summer resort looking and smelling bad for weeks.

Bautista, who told councilors that the crisis was over, said he alone was responsible for it and was willing to go to jail for the actions he took to solve it.

Repeating statements he made at a July 31 press conference, the mayor shielded City Hall staff by asking councilors to blame him instead.

The crisis started when residents of Barangay Irisan and a neighboring subdivision in Tuba, Benguet, barricaded the city’s only dump on July 14.

The dump was officially closed early this year but a portion of it was kept open. Mounting garbage in this section now threatens to fall on houses below the dump because of a damaged retaining wall.

Bautista asked city administrator Peter Fianza to order the hauling of the city’s daily trash to a landfill in Tarlac when garbage started to pile up in city parks and major streets.

The mayor said the city was to resume regular garbage collection services this week, while local officials studied 15 offers by private landowners and local governments in Benguet and La Union to buy or build engineered sanitary landfills on pieces of property that they own.

The council allocated P10 million to help develop at least six material recovery facilities (MRFs). MRFs are sorting and buying stations for recycled materials.

Bautista also hired contractors to rebuild the dump’s old retaining wall to allow Baguio to continue using a hectare of the five-hectare dump until the city has its own landfill.

The mayor said the city government was studying plans to build multiple landfills.

Aside from managing wastes from a growing migrant population, the city needs to accommodate wastes from expanding industrial and business establishments.

In the meantime, the city would have to rely on the commercial landfill in Capas, Tarlac, Bautista said.

But a group of lawyers, headed by former Mayor Braulio Yaranon, questioned this solution because the Metro Waste Management Corp., the contractor, is already doing the hauling.

Yaranon, a retired regional trial court judge, joined protests against the continued use of the Irisan dump.

In a letter to Vice Mayor Daniel Fariñas on July 28, the lawyers warned Bautista that pursuing a contract with Metro Waste was illegal because it did not go through the regular bidding process, and could cost Bautista “fines and a jail term.”

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