City authorities to rent more garbage trucks

City authorities to rent more garbage trucks

JAKARTA (JP): The City Sanitation Agency plans to rent more garbage trucks next financial year in an effort to handle more effectively the increasing problem of garbage in the city.

The head of the agency, Moch. Subasir, said yesterday the measure is to enable the agency to transport all of the garbage from where it accumulates to the city's landfill sites.

At the moment the agency can only collect 21,085 cubic meters of garbage per day, with the remaining 5,000 cubic meters being thrown into gutters, rivers or vacant lots.

"We plan to hire more garbage trucks from private companies in the next budget year because at the moment the number of trucks is not adequate to handle all the garbage disposed of by Jakartans," Subasir said.

He said there are currently 900 garbage trucks with 715 of them belonging to the agency, while the remaining 185 are rented from private companies. He said ideally the agency needs 1,300 trucks

Each year the agency proposes to the city administration to hire more trucks from private companies but the city administration has always turned down the proposal.

"In the 1996/1997 budget year we will propose to rent about 100 trucks and I hope the administration will approve it," Subasir said.

Deputy Governor for Economic and Development Affairs TB. M. Rais said earlier this week that the administration is aware of the agency's difficulties and renting more private trucks seems to be the only alternative to cope with the problem.

He said the step is aimed at improving the agency's service and would be cheaper than buying new trucks. "We don't have to pay for the maintenance costs of the rented trucks," he added.

The city administration has allocated Rp 31.018 billion to the agency in the 1996/1997 budget year, an increase from Rp 30.196 billion in this year's budget.

It has also set a target of the agency's revenue from sanitary fees at Rp 12.5 billion in the next budget year, an increase from Rp 10.2 billion in the 1995/1996 budget year. (yns)