GOTCHA By Jarius Bondoc Updated June 19, 2009 12:00 AM
SAN VICENTE, Palawan — Four local leaders and an international filmmaker have been linked to the environmental ruin in this seaside town touted as the next Boracay. So the provincial conservation movement has sued them for graft and illegal quarrying.
Charged last week before the provincial prosecutor were Mayors Antonio Gonzales of San Vicente and Samuel de Jesus of Busuanga, Vice Mayor Joseph Armstrong Palanca of Coron, and former mayor Iber Chou of Española. Also accused of illegally leveling a mountainside to make way for a tourist resort were world-famous producer-director Michael Gleissner and 56 workers identified only as John Does.
Allegedly in April and May equipment owned by de Jesus, Palanca and Chou bulldozed trees, backhoed slopes and trucked off 36,000 cubic meters of rocks, gravel and soil to fill up a six-hectare fishpond downhill. The 14-hectare mountainside was real property co-owned by Gonzales and sold recently to Gleissner, along with the fishpond and beachfront property beyond, for conversion into a high-class resort and yacht club. Gonzales supposedly allowed the woodcutting and quarrying without permit from provincial authorities.
In the complaint, Kilusan Sagip Kalikasan (KSK) head Atty. Nesario Awat said the accused conspired to extract quarry resources worth P1.8 million belonging to the state. He also said the local leaders took advantage of their position and gravely abused their authority to give Gleissner undue favor and advantage to level the mountainside. Not only was the quarrying illegal, but the Provincial Mining and Regulatory Board (PMRB) also had earlier ordered Gonzales to “cease and desist” from abetting it — to no avail.
The KSK is composed of government and private environmentalists. It serves as the enforcer of the PMRB, which was formed under a special law, the Strategic Environmental Plan for Palawan (Republic Act 7611), to preserve the country’s last frontier.
A team of newsmen and staff of the PMRB-KSK visited the site Wednesday and witnessed a backhoe, a bulldozer, and two trucks at work in the land-filled fishpond. Billboards of Gonzales rallying the townsfolk to report and fight illegal quarrying abounded. But the PMRB-KSK personnel point out to newsmen at least two other illegal quarries, aside from the Marina Yacht Club project.
Because it was a Wednesday, sabong (cockfight) day, other heavy equipment on the nearby slopes were idle, and Gonzales was unavailable for interview. At press time he had not returned calls although he said he would. Gleissner could not be immediately contacted by e-mail.
Gonzales reportedly had told the PMRB-KSK that the leveling of the mountainside, land-filling of the fishpond and consequent construction of the Marina Yacht Club were covered by an environmental compliance certificate from the Department of Environment and Natural Resources. Moreover, the Palawan Council for Sustainable Development supposedly had cleared the tourism project. The San Vicente municipal council too had passed a new land-use ordinance to encourage the construction of tourist resorts and an international airport.
Told by the provincial team yesterday that the illegal quarrying was going on despite the cease-and-desist order, Gov. Joel Reyes consulted with capitol lawyers on how to make the San Vicente municipal police enforce it. He said he will also sue the town officials and the quarry operators with theft of minerals on top of Awat’s charges. “I am for development of our province, but it has to be done right,” he said. There is a process for securing tree cutting, quarrying and large-scale construction permits, and part of it is the study of environmental impact.
Investors and local officials have been talking of putting up tourist facilities here, especially along the 16-kilometer
A total logging ban was imposed in Palawan in the early ’90s, thus allowing the province’s mountains to regain its lushness. But San Vicente’s prospects as “the new Boracay” is a long way off, according to tourism experts. It took two decades from the ’80s to the ’90s to develop Boracay, and it is only beginning to boom, and will continue to, they say. There’s not even a power plant in San Vicente to electrify the airport, much more the high-end resorts. And that power plant could prove to be another environmental issue.
