Unmentioned

The sanitary landfill operated by Metro Clark in Capas, Tarlac will likely be shut down after all. This will have repercussions on waste disposal throughout Central Luzon. But government claims there is no legal basis for Metro Clark to claim an “automatic” 25-year extension of its contract.

Clark Development Corporation (CDC) and its parent agency Bases Conversion and Development Authority (BCDA) decided to reuse the land currently occupied by the Metro Clark operation. That decision appears firm.

Metro Clark has gone to court to force the CDC to grant it a 25-year contract extension on the grounds that the project is a joint venture with a foreign partner. But there is no word, phrase, sentence or paragraph in the existing contract that says the project is extendable by another 25 years – much less, automatically extendable for that period.

Perhaps that should have been clearly worded into the contract. But it was not. It might have been a serious oversight on the part of the operators of the landfill, for which they should blame their lawyers.

For months, the CDC has been advising Metro Clark that the landfill contract will not be renewed. This is to signal the operators of the landfill that they have only so much time to wind down the operation and advise their clients who are mainly local governments in the area. CDC is the only agency that has the power to extend or terminate the contract.

The CDC’s advisory of its intent to use the land for modernizing New Clark City should have allowed enough time for clients of the landfill to make other plans for their waste and for other potential investors in sanitary waste disposal to start their respective projects.

Metro Clark, however, has been sending out contrary signals. It has been entering into new contracts with local governments that extend beyond the contract life of its landfill. They seemed confident in winning an extension even if there was no legal basis for doing so. All this guarantees is that there would be chaos when the existing contract expires and other alternative trash disposal sites are unready.

Metro Clark appears to have assumed it had an entitlement that was not there to begin with. As a consequence, it unduly raised the stakes in the closure of its landfill – perhaps to inject inevitability to the extension it wants.

And so we now find ourselves in this unhealthy situation. Over a hundred local governments depend on the Metro Clark landfill for the disposal of their trash. All other alternatives will be costlier.

The sanitary landfill operator has done nothing to begin unwinding its operations. This guarantees that non-renewal of the contract will be messy. Metro Clark has placed all its bets in winning in court.

Murkier

For some strange reason, the owner of St. Timothy Construction Corporation decided to contest the mayorship of Pasig against a popular incumbent rather than fulfill its responsibilities under the P18-billion election automation contract it won from the Comelec. This produced an unhealthy cascade of consequences that puts the integrity of the next electoral cycle in peril.

St. Timothy is joint venture partner to the South Korean firm Miru that is under contract to deliver the new automated counting system for use next May. Its owner’s decision to enter politics excuses the firm from the joint venture. Even as it withdraws from the joint venture, however, St. Timothy retains its contractual obligation to deliver the automated system.

It will be recalled that the consortium led by Miru won the humongous automation contract unopposed. The Supreme Court took the Comelec to task for summarily barring the only other possible competitor for the bid. The award of the contract to Miru drew much criticism over the lack of transparency in the bid, the spotty technology Miru deployed in other elections elsewhere and the violation of the law’s requirement that the supplier use tried and tested automation technology.

The award of the lucrative contract to Miru was murky to begin with. The withdrawal of St. Timothy makes this affair even murkier.

Several lawmakers and concerned groups have been trying to call public attention to the flaws in the contract with Miru. Former lawmaker Edgar Erice now opines that the withdrawal of one joint venture partner effectively dissolves the contract.

Civil society groups such as Democracy Watch and Right to Know Right Now (R2KRN) have raised vital questions about the contract with Miru. The same groups now question, after the withdrawal of St. Timothy, whether the Comelec did proper due diligence about the ownership structure of the consortium to which it almost summarily awarded the largest election supply contract ever.

The Comelec is trying to downplay the withdrawal of a consortium partner by claiming the other joint venture partners would simply fill up the financial void left by St. Timothy. For Erice, however, this withdrawal is an unconscionable mockery of the law.

The Miru consortium has been treating government in a cavalier fashion from the start. It presented Comelec with a mere prototype of the counting machine they were peddling even as the law clearly requires procurement of tried and tested technology.

All throughout this episode, Comelec acted on the basis of expediency rather than propriety. But there are limits to the extent it could continue fudging this mess. Some people are seeing, in the strange withdrawal of St. Timothy, a cover-up in progress.