City to introduce receipts for sanitation fees

City to introduce receipts for sanitation fees

JAKARTA (JP): The City Sanitation Office will soon introduce receipts for sanitation collection fees in a bid to help increase revenues.

Head of the office M. Subasir told reporters that officials from the office will present the receipts to most households in the capital.

Under the system, each family can pay a fee ranging from Rp 500 (US$0.22) to Rp 3,000 monthly depending on their economic capability, he said.

The system has been adopted because the old method, under which a sanitary fee notification was mailed monthly to each household, proved to be ineffective. Under the old system each household was asked to pay a minimum of Rp 3,000.

Only a limited number of families paid the fees, he said. The low payment rate is apparently caused by the inadequate collection method and the public's lack of awareness concerning the importance of paying garbage fees.

"My office managed to collect only Rp 8 billion of the sanitation fees last year, as compared to a target of Rp 10 billion set earlier," Subasir said.

He expressed confidence that the new system will substantially raise the amount of sanitation fees collected.

Subasir said that despite the introduction of the new system, the old method will still be used in a number of areas, including Menteng, Central Jakarta, and Rasuna Said, South Jakarta, where each household is asked to pay Rp 10,000 per month.

Recently, Assistant for City Secretary Prawoto S. Danoemihardjo said that of the small amount of fees paid, the city administration was forced to set aside a fund of about Rp 63 billion annually to finance garbage collection.

Subasir said that of the sanitation payments received this fiscal year, his office has only received Rp 5.9 billion, 59 percent from the target of Rp 10 billion. The current fiscal year ends this month.

"The old system turns out to be ineffective because many notification letters could not be sent to the residents because of the change of their addresses," he said.

Subasir hailed the West Jakarta mayoralty's initiative to open a telephone hot-line to enable residents to report any garbage that has not been picked up.

"Such a service constitutes the mayoralty's participation in speeding up garbage removal. Our garbage trucks are sometimes late in picking up garbage and taking it to the Bekasi waste dump," he said.

He added that the number of trucks owned by his office is insufficient because ideally 2,500 trucks are needed. Only 725 trucks are in service.

Out of the 25,404 cubic meters of waste discarded by Jakarta's residents each day, only 21,085 cubic meters can be handled by the office, with the remainder being thrown into gutters, rivers or vacant lots. (yns)