City's 2002 budget approval likely late

Ahmad Junaidi, The Jakarta Post, Puncak

The opening of a two-day conference between 85 city councillors and hundreds of city officials at a city-owned resort in the mountains of Puncak near Bogor to discuss the 2002 city budget on Wednesday ended inconclusively.

This has stirred fears that, failing significant progress by the end of Thursday, a postponement of the budget approval, which had been scheduled before Jan. 31, will be imminent.

"There was no significant result achieved today -- I'm afraid that the budget cannot be approved on time," Councillor Sambudi Bakri of the National Mandate party (PAN) told reporters on Wednesday afternoon.

Sambudi, of the council's Commission B for economic affairs, said that the commission members found several dual allocations of the same fund in the budget that could not be resolved within the timeframe of the Puncak meeting.

At the meeting, participants were divided into five commissions, each of which consisted of 15 councillors and 130 city officials.

Commission D for development affairs, for example, discussed the budget with the officials of the city public works, the city transportation agency, and the sanitation agency.

Ineffectiveness was evident since, when the councillors discussed the budget with one group of agency officials, other agency's officials ignored the overall progress of the meeting.

Commission D chairman Sayogo Hendro Subroto blamed the lack of progress on the large number of participants of the discussion, which led to overcrowding.

"But we don't have a larger place to conduct such a meeting," Sayogo of the Indonesian Democratic Party of Struggle (PDIP) said.

Almost all of the councillors and officials brought their own cars to the Puncak meeting, forcing some to park outside the resort and take up considerable amounts of time in the process.

Many of them, needless to say, could have used city buses.

To make matters worse, many agency heads brought dozens of their own subordinates who know technical matters of the budget.

Dozens of hotel rooms, which each cost between Rp 100,000 and Rp 200,000, prepared by the organizing committee are empty because many participants are choosing to return to Jakarta at the end of the day.

Many participants also have their lunches outside the Jaya Raya; only few others, including their drivers, actually ate their lunches there.

Officials from public works, for example, had their lunches at Handayani Restaurant, nearby the Jaya Raya, while officials from the city public relations office had their lunches at Papaleuyan Restaurant.

Council Chairman Edy Waluyo said that the council building in Jl. Kebun Sirih could not accommodate such a budget meeting. "That's why we hold the meeting in Puncak, to make it more effective," Edy said.

A chorus of public criticism has mounted from a number of places: The Jakarta Residents Forum Chairman Azas Tigor Nainggolan, for instance, has said that the Rp 1.5 billion meeting will only waste public money.

It is a sentiment more and more people seem to share.