FIRING LINE: Some trash talk

FIRING LINE: Some trash talk

By Robert B. Roque Jr | August 4, 2026

There is a truth so common it barely needs an Ombudsman to say it out loud. Yet Boying Remulla said it anyway, if only to expose the filth of its nature: garbage collection has been a racket in almost every city and municipality in the country.

“Pinakamalaking negosyo ng lahat ng mayor ng Pilipinas. Lahat, walang exception,” he said. The country’s chief graft-buster, it is the biggest, dirtiest business of nearly every mayor, save perhaps Pasig City when Vico Sotto became mayor.

Well, it’s about time this issue came to the fore just as President Marcos, in his fifth SONA, tried to appeal to the better senses of the working middle class. He vowed to overhaul the 25-year-old Ecological Solid Waste Management Act.

Let’s just hope this expose is not just another publicity stunt to earn points for the administration. What the garbage issue needs is an honest, line-by-line reckoning with a law that mayors have quietly outgrown, and quietly profited from.

Lest we forget, garbage doesn’t simply disappear after collection— it either ends up where it belongs or where it eventually comes back to haunt us. It clogs canals and rivers, worsens flooding every typhoon season, dirties our communities, and erodes the very discipline the law was meant to instill. Cleaning up this racket may well be the quickest way to start cleaning up the country.

Shame on you, sir!

Now, to Bulacan — a province that cannot seem to catch a break from its own officials. Ghost flood-mitigation projects. The Angat Dam drying up this El Niño year, leaving households scrounging for potable water.

And as if that were not enough, a provincial board member accused of groping a fellow board member’s waist and backside at, of all places, a Christmas party.

News has spread that this Board Member was suspended recently for 30 days without pay. That’s a timid slap on the wrist, if you ask me.

Of course the official denies everything, calling it fabricated. But for a province already gasping under mismanagement and drought, this is the indignity nobody really needs. Mr. Board Member — keep it in your pants, or keep out of public office.

Meralco’s compliance

Lastly, I’ll reserve space for some saving grace: Meralco’s commitment to comply with the Energy Regulatory Commission (ERC)’s order to refund P9.5 billion in over-collected charges.

This is a P9-billion commitment that the power distribution firm is honoring without a fight, spread over six months, translating to roughly fifty-nine centavos back per kilowatt-hour for residential customers.

Credit where due — Meralco filed the applications itself, and compliance, this time, came without theatrics. But let us not applaud too loudly. A refund of money that was never Meralco’s to keep in the first place is not generosity. It is simply, finally, giving back what belonged to the consumer all along.

Then, next part — let’s see the ERC, Meralco, and every electric cooperative in this country move with that same fervor on the President’s marching order to eradicate systems loss charges.

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