AFTER ALL
Behn Fer. Hortaleza

A SLIP of paper handed to a member of our household last week and guess what its message was — penalties, yes, penalties for violations of four basic rules in cleanliness and beautification.

Kind enough to provide a slight-to-stiff level of fines for those who have more household garbage than they can handle, the village guys have spelled out the penalties set forth under the law: from P300 for the first offense to P500 for the second and P1,000 and imprisonment (whew!) for the third time you’re found and caught littering.

A similar rate of fine/penalty applies to unclean premises, surrounding buildings and /or vacant lots with an addendum that said: “Cost of cleanup ordered by Mayor chargeable to the owner.”

Now, if you indiscriminately dump your wastes (preferably, not the kind that quickly comes to your mind, stinking you!) just anywhere, that could cost you from a low of P500 to a high P1,000 and yes, imprisonment. As for the pyromaniacs who do those open burnings (we wonder how that differs to ‘closed’ burning) they’ll be slapped a P300 fine “but not more than P1,000.”

Yup, they’re in earnest now, we tell you. This after the initial appeals didn’t seem to sink into the cerebellum of some Pogo Grande residents, especially the “open burning” part which we believe is the kind of burning you do with dried leaves, scraps of paper and old clothes, with a little tire or rubber thrown in for a real suffocating smoke.

We wouldn’t know for sure if smoking up those rows of mango trees to induce their flowering or fruit-bearing, an old mango-growing practice that seems to really work, can be considered punishable too. Where there’s smoke, there’s fire?

And yet, we do love this new campaign for better cleanliness in the barangays. It’s about time. Too much attention for spic-n-span look is being devoted to the downtown area, the face of Dagupan City, but the body, i.e. the barangays are almost left to their own devices especially after City Hall ordered the Waste Management Division to already stop the garbage truck rounds of the villages sometime last year, to encourage waste segregation at source..

So you see, the city’s villages are left with not much choice but to bite the bullet and do cleanups their own – or they die of their own stink. Thus, the slip of paper detailing penalties, effective February 1.

Of course, as in any human drama, there are the compliants and the defiants. With the former, that slip of paper would be like Moses’ tablets itself, to be obeyed like salvation at Armageddon depended on it. To the latter, it only signals a creeping concentration of State power in the village council that needs to be tested or taunted to see how far those councilmen are willing to bend backward in enforcing their rules and penalties, if at all.

Omigod, hold on there now, while I rush to put out the garbage by the gate for collection. Track me back later.

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SAID AND DONE: Radyo ng Bayan-Dagupan’s Alex L. Duque, that government radio station’s long-serving manager, is leaving government service for good soon. He’s holding a birthday-cum-despedida party at the family house on A.B. Fernandez West on Tuesday, January 30, with relatives and close friends to include the Patrima primos and primas in attendance. .. We consider Alex one of our true, real friends in the media circuit, a friendship dating back when we were regional communications officer of the defunct NMPC and did close coordination work with him for government broadcasts. Non-controversial and always proper in speech and conduct, he’s one of a few “presidentiable” materials in the local Press who hasn’t quite been elected to the post yet… Mayor Simpling Rosario’s Binmaley must really be in dire straits it can’t even pay a measly advertising fee it owes this paper for almost a year now…. Binmaley has been coming up with many fund-raisers since last year and another so-called malaga-bingalo festival next month and yet its bills keep piling up. It has passed, we understand, two supplemental budgets last year and still, many bills have not been paid. If it can’t settle payments for simple contracts with advertisers, how expect it to pay the bigger obligations? Or is that precisely what the officials are doing: Paying bigger ones, for a thousand and one reasons, and keeping the smaller creditors hanging? Cruelty can take many forms.