City budget deliberations deadlocked

Bambang Nurbianto, The Jakarta Post/Jakarta

The contentious issue over the city administration's bizarre programs in which trillions of rupiah of taxpayers' money will be handed out without a system of accountability, has dragged the deliberation of the draft city budget for 2006 into a deadlock.

The scheduled deliberation hearings on Thursday and Friday were canceled as none of the relevant officials appeared at the City Council after the latter made suggestions for several changes in funding allocations.

The councillors underlined particular programs, which they said were prone to misappropriation since there were no monitoring systems to ensure regular reporting and evaluation over the use of the money.

These include the funding for public service improvements in districts and subdistricts and the "transferred funds" for several organizations and institutions, which are not controlled by the city administration.

"Governor Sutiyoso disagrees with us about cutting several of the allocations. He did not send his officials to the scheduled hearings on Thursday or Friday," member of Council's budget drafting committee Igo Ilham told The Jakarta Post on Friday.

With the deadlock, it was unlikely that the final approval of the budget would be done by Monday, he added.

In the budget proposal, the administration allocates Rp 268.50 billion for "public service improvement programs" in all 267 subdistricts. With the funds, each subdistrict will receive around Rp 1.7 billion to improve public services.

For a similar program in all 44 districts, the administration proposed a total of Rp 132 billion.

The Council's Commission A for legal and administrative affairs rejected the proposal as there had not yet been an evaluation of the pilot project that was done this year, which involved 50 subdistricts and 10 districts, each of them receiving Rp 1 billion to improve public services.

The commission also questioned the transfer of Rp 1.24 trillion to several institutions, including the City Police, the military headquarters, the district courts, the prosecutor's offices, the Jakarta General Elections Commission, the Jakarta branch of the Indonesian National Sports Committee and the soccer team Persija.

Corruption cases at the highest levels of the election commission are a glaring example that the administration could not control the use of such transferred funds, said Commission A chairman Achmad Suaidy who urged a cut of 30 percent for that item in the budget.

Another disputed issue was the rejection by Sutiyoso to sell the city administration's shares in beer producer PT Delta Djakarta proposed by the Commission C for financial affairs.

According to the commission, the city only received Rp 1.77 billion in dividends this year, which they deemed relatively insignificant compared to the city's stake valued at nearly Rp 139 billion.

Commission C proposed that the proceeds from the sale of the shares could be used for the education sector, particularly to provide free education for students in elementary and junior high schools.