Gerindra Pans Basuki’s Plans to Develop East Jakarta
Jakarta. The city administration’s plans to make East Jakarta “orderly and safe” focus too much on physical infrastructure and provide no solution for such issues as street crime and domestic violence, a lawmaker said on Thursday.
“Look at it this way: East Jakarta has since long been regarded as an area with a high level of crime, but is that [issue] included in the governor’s flagship ’5T’ program or not?” M. Syarif, secretary of the Great Indonesia Movement (Gerindra) Party caucus at the City Council, told a development planning discussion at the East Jakarta mayor’s office.
“Don’t focus only on the program and forget about the smaller things [that matter],” he added.
Governor Basuki Tjahaja Purnama’s 5T program proposes five focal points in building an orderly (tertib, hence the T) society: orderly traffic, orderly waste disposal, orderly behavior of street sellers, orderly construction in residential areas and orderly demonstrations.
Bambang Musyawardhana, the mayor of East Jakarta, said at the discussion that he wanted to work on seven priority issues as part of the 5T program: upgrading hospital and school buildings, reinvigorating traditional markets, tackling illegal street parking and sellers, reserving space for public parks, promoting proper waste disposal, cleaning up slum areas, especially along rivers, and making sure people can live in a “clean, cozy and beautiful environment.”
Jakarta, a special administrative region led by a governor, consists of five cities that each have a mayor (North, East, South, West and Central Jakarta).
Deputy Governor Djarot Saiful Hidayat said on Thursday that a renewed focus on development was necessary because in the past many plans never materialized.
“We like to make plans, but we don’t bring them to completion,” he said. “We build a school, and then run out of roof tiles. We build half a bridge. It’s just never finished.”
Projects often get delayed because funds run out due to markups in the procurement of building supplies and labor.
Djarot explained that indeed there were tasks that needed to be done continuously, like making sure rivers can flow unimpeded by construction, but that some things just needed to be completed in one haul.
He added that officials should focus on repairing schools instead of offices.
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