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By Wilhelmina S. Orozco
(First of four parts)
Despite a Supreme Court decision upholding the
right of the farmer residents to retain their land at Barangay San
Juan, Antipolo City, the Environmental Management Bureau of the
Department of Environment and Natural Resources issued a new
environmental certificate of compliance to a land developer to
expand its golf course in the barangay.
The certificate, granted to Fil-Estate Golf and
Development Inc. on April 24, 2003, and signed by Environment
Secretary Elisea G. Gozun, does not seem appropriate at this time,
because the basis for building the first phase of the project has
been declared illegal.
The project is part of the Forest Hills
Residential Estates and Golf Course, initiated in 1994 by Kingsville
Construction and Development Corp., headed by Johnson Ong, and
Fil-Estate Properties Inc., headed by Robert John L. Sobrepeña,
chair of the Metro Manila Railroad Transit.
The affected lands, besides Barangay San Juan,
are also Barangays Inarawan and Bagong Nayon. Before the project
started, the farmer residents in the area protested; after some
time, some relented to pressures to leave; others sold their rights,
since they had no land titles to hold on to. After several months of
operations, those left behind rued the way the companies ruined the
forest land. Some said they were not told that the area would be
bulldozed. Instead trees were chopped and hundreds bulldozed, some
being left on a creek to rot. A few houses standing on the path of
the bulldozers were swept away.
In a matter of months, the natural habitat of
flora and fauna was gone, many left homeless or resettled elsewhere
by the corporations. No amount of pleadings by the people could stop
the companies’ operations.
According to Acebedo Santos, project manager of
Fil-Estate, “Mr. Ong is the owner of Forest Hills. We are just the
developers. He produces the lot. Actually the standing agreement [is
that] we can’t buy any land at Forest hills without his approval.
Any expansion around the area should go through him, if he wants
to.”
Antipolo City: Saving overcrowded Metro
Manila
Traveling to Antipolo City, which is about 29
kilometers from Manila, can be a leisurely drive through the long
Marcos Highway from Cubao, Quezon City, or through Sumulong Highway
in Marikina City. In a profile provided by Antipolo Mayor Angelito
C. Gatlabayan, the city has a total land area of 32,298 hectares,
which represent 18.8 percent of the total land area of the province
of Rizal. Barangay San Juan, site of the golf course, is one of
Antipolo’s 16 barangays. “It is important to note that 75
percent of Antipolo is forest land,” the profile said, emphasizing
the general topography of the city. The population, however, is
concentrated mainly on 25 percent of its land area, serving as a
satellite city and home to people who have chosen to leave the
congested cities of Metro Manila. The 2000 census put the city’s
population at 470,000; by 2003 the figure could have already grown
to 600,000.
Some farmers in the three barangays settled down
there before the start of the project. The first wave, which arrived
in the fifties, were farmers from other provinces who sought land to
till. The second wave came during the seventies, when the country
was under martial law. The third settled in the eighties, when
Marcos proclaimed the Lungsod Silangan “to absorb the population
overspill in Greater Manila.”
Permit discrepancies: lack of ECC
Investigating the background of the project
required analyzing the permits given to it. Several were released by
government offices, the local barangay, the DENR-Southern Tagalog,
and the DENR Central Office, Environmental Management Bureau. The
papers, however, showed twin moves of the corporations: the permit
for the residential subdivision was sought from the DENR Southern
Tagalog office and the approval for the golf course came from the
central office, golf course committee.
Efforts to get the names of the members of the
committee proved futile. Employees kept mum about the names of the
people who approved the project. It can be surmised, however, that
the secretary at the time could have had a hand in it, since
building a golf course is an environmentally critical project—it
could have harmful consequences on the land and the people.
This writer asked for a copy or to examine the
project proposal and/or the environmental certificate of compliance
given to the Forest Hills project, from the offices at Barangay San
Juan, at Antipolo City Hall, the DENR regional and provincial
offices, as well as the Environmental Management Bureau at the DENR
central office. These offices either said they would still look for
the papers; it would be difficult to retrieve them, because the
project is already very old, or that another office is in charge of
the paperwork.
Nonetheless, some permits were retrieved, but
for the later phases of operations of Fil-Estate, some discrepancies
can be gleaned from them. The permits had no attachments like the
DENR environmental impact assessment, which should have been the
basis for releasing the environmental certificate of compliance.
Moreover, the DENR Southern Tagalog office showed a permit for the
residential subdivision but not for the golf course, while the
Environmental Management Bureau claimed that in 1994 the regional
directors could approve such projects without their passing through
the central office.
The difficulty of retrieving government papers
was replicated at the Antipolo City Planning Development Office.
When its chief was asked about the standards for approving the
permit to build and operate the residential subdivision and golf
course, his responses were curt, pointing only to the Lungsod
Silangan proclamation of Marcos. To the question where a copy of the
proclamation could be had, he answered crankily: “Why do you keep
badgering me with questions?” In exasperation, he pointed to the
Sangguniang Panlalawigan (Provincial Board), to which his office
endorsed the project for approval. I then went to the third floor,
where without much fuss the staff released a copy of Resolution
52-94, dated May 17, 1994, providing the imprimatur for the projects
approval.
(May 17 is the birthday of Evangeline Orozco,
the previous owner of the mother title of the excluded portion in
San Juan, where most of the title owners of the subdivided farm lots
have refused to sell their properties to Kingsville, preferring to
cultivate the land themselves.)
Not satisfied with the resolution, this writer
returned to ask for a copy of the proclamation. This time I went
directly to the office of the mayor. I was led to the previous
planning office without any success, then to the legal office, but
the chief was in a meeting. I was asked to wait for about an hour.
When the legal chief was through, however, he led me to an office
that he said had the proclamation, but no employees were around.
Since it was past 5 p.m., he advised me to
return the next day. Amelia Danao, the wife of a farmer at Barangay
San Juan, who volunteered to get the copy, returned the next day
only to wait from 9 a.m. to 12 lunchtime and be told that they did
not have the copy.
Conflict in the bureaucracy
On January 28, 2004, a whiff of hope in
investigating the background of the project came in the person of
Samson de Leon, chief of staff of Regional Executive Director
Primitivo Galinato of DENR Southern Tagalog, which covers the
provinces of Cavite, Laguna, Batangas, Rizal and Quezon.
He said that in 1997, as provincial
environmental and natural resources officer, “I stopped the
operations of Fil-Estate [at] Forest Hills. Our team found out that
Fil-Estate started developing the area without the environmental
certificate of compliance. So I issued a notice of violation.”
Continued tomorrow
Part 2 |
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