Isko Moreno Garbage Fee Keeps Ambushing New Businesses

What It Means

• The Isko Moreno garbage fee under Ordinance 9151 is still hitting new Manila businesses every quarter, months after the January backlash faded from the news cycle.
• El Latte Coffee’s August renewal statement shows its annual bill jump to roughly 105,770 pesos, with the garbage fee alone accounting for 60,000 pesos of that total.
• A Supreme Court petition seeking to void the ordinance was dismissed in March on a standing technicality, without the Court ruling on whether the fee itself is legal.
• No Manila business owner, the exact group the Court said could bring a real challenge, has filed one in the five months since.
• Businesses renewing later in the year get none of the warning that January renewers had, and no legal precedent protects any of them either way.

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Seven months after Manila’s business community first erupted over a new waste collection ordinance, the Isko Moreno garbage fee is still catching operators off guard. El Latte Coffee, a cafe on Taft Avenue in Malate, posted its 2026 permit renewal statement on August 4. It shows a garbage fee of 60,000 pesos sitting inside a total bill of roughly 105,770 pesos, well above what the shop says it paid the year before. The January news cycle moved on months ago. The billing cycle never did.

Ordinance 9151 Rewrote Manila’s Fee Schedule in One Move

The Isko Moreno garbage fee traces back to a single ordinance passed without a phase in period. Manila’s City Council approved Ordinance No. 9151 in November 2025. Mayor Francisco “Isko” Moreno Domagoso signed it on December 1. It replaced a garbage fee schedule that had not been touched since 2013, tying new rates to a business’s floor area, its category, and how much waste that category is assumed to generate. Payment is now built into the permit renewal process itself: a business cannot legally renew without settling the garbage fee first, regardless of whether it disputes the amount.

City officials frame the increase as a correction, not a windfall. City Treasurer Paul Vega has said the old rates no longer reflected the actual cost of hauling and disposal. City Legal Officer Luch Gempis pointed to rising fuel and fleet costs as a driver behind the new schedule. The mayor has cited a decade-old freeze on fees against a modern waste stream as the justification for resetting the numbers all at once, rather than in stages.

The Numbers Behind the Isko Moreno Garbage Fee

The scale of the Isko Moreno garbage fee only makes sense next to what came before it. City figures put the cost of running Manila’s garbage collection at around 1.35 billion pesos a year, against total garbage fee collections of roughly 110 million pesos across the entire 2013 to 2025 period, more than a decade combined. Closing that gap in one ordinance, rather than through a phased schedule, is what produced increases business owners have described as ten to twelve times their prior bills.

Manila’s rates now sit far above what comparable businesses pay just outside city limits.

Business type	Manila	Pasig	Makati	Quezon City
100 sqm restaurant	36,000 pesos/year	6,000 pesos/year	4,000 pesos/year	as low as 1,200 pesos/year
Retail store	12,000 to 24,000 pesos/year	not disclosed	as low as 1,200 pesos/year	starting at 156 pesos/year

For a restaurant of that size, Manila’s fee runs roughly six to thirty times what the same business would pay in a neighboring city, before rent, wages, or any other fixed cost enters the picture.

The Legal Challenge That Never Reached the Merits

The Isko Moreno garbage fee has already faced one Supreme Court test, and it failed for a reason that left the ordinance itself untouched. On February 5, John Barry Tayam, a public school teacher and taxpayer from Las Piñas, filed a petition asking the Court to void the ordinance outright and to issue a temporary restraining order ahead of the February 13 renewal deadline. His petition argued the fee had become “unjust, excessive, oppressive, and confiscatory” under Section 130 of the Local Government Code, and that the city skipped the public hearings and publication the law requires before an ordinance like this can take effect.

The Court dismissed the petition on March 16, but not on those grounds. The En Banc resolution found Tayam lacked legal standing, since he does not operate a business in Manila and is not among the “covered persons” the ordinance regulates. It also rejected treating the case as a taxpayer’s suit, since a garbage fee is a regulatory measure rather than a tax, and it declined to weigh in on whether public hearings actually happened, calling that a factual question for a lower court to sort out first. The constitutionality question Tayam raised, whether a fee this steep crosses from regulation into confiscation, was never actually answered.

Nobody With Standing Has Stepped Up

Tayam accepted the outcome without pursuing reconsideration, and pointed directly at who should file next. He said any real challenge to the Isko Moreno garbage fee needs to come from someone the ordinance actually covers, a Manila resident or business owner with standing the Court cannot wave away on a technicality. Five months later, no such petition appears to have been filed. The legal opening the Court left in March is still sitting open in August, unclaimed by the businesses it was built for.

That gap matters more than it looks. A ruling on the merits, in either direction, would give every business renewing after them a fixed answer: pay it, or don’t. Instead, each quarter’s group of renewers absorbs the fee under the same uncertainty as the last, with no court decision to point to and no organized case working its way through the system on their behalf.

A Renewal Date Away From the Same Shock

The pattern did not end with January’s headlines. Robby Sylianteng, who owns the First United Building on Escolta Street and sits with the Escolta Commercial Association, told Rappler the fee hike discourages tenants from renewing at all, making it harder to keep the century-old commercial strip occupied. He noted fees stayed flat from 2019 to 2022, when Moreno held the same office and businesses were struggling through the pandemic, a contrast he raised to argue the current spike could have been phased in the same way.

El Latte Coffee’s August statement shows the Isko Moreno garbage fee working exactly as designed, just later on the calendar. Business permits in Manila renew on a staggered schedule through the year rather than all at once in January, so every quarter produces a fresh group of owners opening their statement of account for the first time. The businesses that renewed early got a warning from the ones ahead of them, and a five-week Supreme Court case to point to. The businesses renewing now get neither.

The Door Manila Left Open Is Still Open

The Isko Moreno garbage fee has outlasted a Supreme Court petition, an outrage cycle, and seven months of quarterly renewals without ever facing a ruling on whether it holds up. The mayor who signed it is already campaigning for another term. The business owners the Court said could challenge it keep renewing instead of filing. Each quarter, Manila collects the fee from operators who had no reason to expect it, and the legal question that could settle the matter for all of them stays exactly where it was in March: open, and unclaimed.

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