Councillors to LA despite outcry
JAKARTA (JP): Following controversial trips undertaken by councillors to Australia, Japan and South Africa late last year, 15 councillors are again to make a one-week overseas visit, this time to Los Angeles in the United States.
The chairman of the City Council's Commission C for budgetary and financial affairs, Amarullah Asbah, confirmed on Monday that the 15 councillors would leave for Los Angeles on Sunday to conduct a comparative study.
The councillors would study matters related to budgetary and financial affairs in Los Angeles, including the levying of entertainment taxes and advertisement taxes, he said.
Amarullah said the councillors would not be accompanied by city officials on the LA trip so to avoid accusations that there was collusion between the councillors and the officials.
He said that half of the 15 councillors who would visit Los Angeles were members of Commission C while the remainder would be drawn from other commissions.
He insisted that councillors who did not join the trip would not be allowed to claim travel allowances.
"I myself will not be going to LA. I visited LA when I was a councillor for the 1992-1997 period," he said.
A number of city officials and 16 councillors participated in controversial trips to Australia, Japan and South Africa in October last year, financed by the 2000 city budget and city- owned developer PT Pembangunan Jaya Ancol.
Three councillors reportedly received travel allowances worth about Rp 52 million each even though they canceled their travel plans.
Amarullah claimed the latest trip would be fully financed by the 2001 city budget, denying that city-owned companies would also be involved in footing the bill.
He said the council had allocated Rp 6 billion (US$545,454) to finance foreign trips by the 85 councillors to various countries this year.
"This year we will only undertake one foreign visit to reduce costs. Last year, we undertook two foreign visits," he said.
Some parties have speculated that the councillors' foreign trips are connected with the council's acceptance of Governor Sutiyoso's accountability statement on April 30.
Two week after the speech, a number of councillors reportedly traveled to some Asian countries, accompanied by their spouses. They ended their foreign trips with an Umroh (minor pilgrimage) in Saudi Arabia.
But Amarullah denied the allegations, saying that the trip to Los Angeles had nothing to do with Sutiyoso's accountability report.
"The trip had been arranged before this. It's got nothing to do with the council's acceptance of Governor Sutiyoso's accountability statement last month," Amarullah, from the Golkar Party, insisted.
Meanwhile, the coordinator of the Jakarta Residents Forum (Fakta), Azas Tigor Nainggolan, said he had heard that some councillors had gone on hushed-up foreign visits two weeks after the council accepted Sutiyoso's accountability speech.
"The public might suspect that these trips were given as rewards after the council accepted Sutiyoso's speech," Azas told The Jakarta Post on Monday.
Therefore, he called on council speaker Eddy Waluyo to make public any foreign trips made by councillors, and whether they were funded out of the budget or not.
"Thus far, Edy never says anything to the public about planned foreign trips by the councillors," he said.
He regretted that the councillors still planned to travel abroad amid the current political and economic crisis.
"Although we have enough funds in the budget, they shouldn't be frittered away on such unnecessary things. We could use the funds for other purposes, such as for poverty alleviation programs," he said. (jun)