Bacolod City Administrator Roger Balo yesterday said he will give priority to the Solid Waste Management program of the city as he resumes duty at City Hall after a vacation in the U.S.

Balo had filed for an official leave starting November 7, 2007 up to December, and later asked for an extension due to health reasons.

He said his family in the U.S. was concerned about his blood sugar which he could not control while he was still here. He asked the mayor for an extension of leave because he wanted to be physically fit before going back to City Hall, he said.

His wife and his eldest daughter, who are both nurses in a hospital in Sacramento, California, saw to it that he fully recovered before he returned, Balo said. His doctor told him that his ailment was stress related, he said, adding that, for the last three years he had been working at an average of 10 hours a day.

While in the U.S. he said he visited one of the material recovery facility in Placer County and he hopes to present what he has observed there to the Solid Waste Management Board in Bacolod.

Based on his observation in the U.S., Balo said he believes the number one solution to the garbage problem is waste segregation at source.  He believes the solution being considered by the city like buying or renting dump trucks is not hitting the root cause of the problem, he said.

Balo said he plans to implement garbage collection twice a week to reduce the expenses of the city. The volume of garbage is dependent on the population, he said.

He also said he believes that the barangays have to cooperate because they have a very important role.

Before he left for the U.S., Balo said the city had identified three areas that may be used as a possible dumpsite. These are the properties of the Lopez, Moya and Gallespin families and a task force had been created to study these sites.

Meanwhile, Balo said he plans to convene a meeting of department heads and get their accomplishment report for 2007, and also convene the Local Finance Committee to see if the city is hitting the target of attaining the P1 billion budget, he said.

There is a need to make an evaluation and assessment of the collection efficiency of the city for the first quarter so that they could probably establish or organize strategies to achieve their target budget, Balo said. This is because the projects lined up for 2008 were based on the P1 billion budget, he said.*CGS

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