A PLAN of the Dagupan City government to build a seafood processing plant here costing some P100 million is being hindered by some 30 defiant squatters of a public land in sitio Russia, barangay Bonuan Binloc.
The squatters refuse to leave a 1.5 hectare foreshore area targeted to be the location of the processing plant whose construction would be bankrolled from the more than U.S. $1.1 million financial grant of the Korean government through the Korean International Cooperation Agency (KOICA).

The proposed plant will have modern processing and storage facilities that will turn up products to be sold in domestic and international markets.
The residents, who are mostly subsistence fishermen, rejected a proposal made by the city government led by Mayor Alipio Fernandez Jr. that they be relocated to the Gawad Kalinga housing project in barangay Bonuan Gueset.
They still refused even if individual families are guaranteed a house of their own which they will only amortize for P200 monthly.
The residents, through their spokesperson Rex Santiago, said they will have no option but to fight it out if the city government will eject them by force from the land which most of them have been occupying since they were born.
The Task Force on Housing and Urban Resettlement headed by city Engineer Virginia Rosario already served notice to individual squatters to voluntarily move out so land preparation for the proposed processing plant can be started.
The barangay chairman of Bonuan Binloc, Ronaldo Torio, said he and the barangay council already asked the residents of the area to give way to the project but they refused to budge.