One body to handle waste management

JAKARTA (JP): The city administration intends to appoint one body to handle garbage in an attempt to make garbage disposal more efficient, city official Prawoto S. Danoemihardjo said yesterday.

Currently four agencies handle 18,600 cubic meters out of the city's 25,400 cubic meters of daily garbage. The rest of the waste is dumped into rivers.

The four parties are the sanitation agency, city-owned market firm PD Pasar Jaya, the public works agency and the park agency.

Pasar Jaya cleans traditional markets; the public works agency cleans sewers and rivers, and the park agency cleans the city's parks.

Prawoto, the city secretary's assistant in charge of economic and development affairs, said a gubernatorial decree on a single entity in charge of garbage will be effective in 1998.

Prawoto said having four agencies to manage sanitation and garbage is often inefficient.

"Sanitation workers sometimes make matters worse by sweeping street waste into gutters," Prawoto said.

He said the idea of having one entity in charge of garbage was drawn from the experience of other cities.

"The idea surfaced after we saw the success of Bandung (West Java) and Medan (North Sumatra) which appointed their city sanitation offices to control garbage management," Prawoto said.

Another factor causing inefficient garbage and sanitation handling is the small fees paid by the public.

Sanitation fees range from Rp 250 (11 U.S. cents) to Rp 10,000 according to a building's size. But Prawoto said people often confuse sanitation fees with garbage collection fees paid to their neighborhood units.

"Having paid their garbage dues, people usually don't pay sanitation fees," Prawoto said.

He said only Rp 8 million of the targeted revenue of Rp 10 million of last year's sanitation fees was collected.

He added that this year's target is Rp 12 million.

"This is really low, considering there are more than 1.5 million buildings in Jakarta," he said.

He remarked the revenue should be more than 100 percent of the target.

Parking

In a related development, Prawoto responded to an earlier suggestion from a councilor on progressive parking fees.

Helmy A.R. Syihab who heads Commission C for city revenue urged the government to charge additional fees for each additional hour people park their vehicles in city parking areas. The practice is already in effect in privately run parking areas.

"Progressive parking fees cannot be enforced in the city now, considering people's diverse economic backgrounds," Prawoto said, adding that the city needs to improve its parking services before charging progressive fees.

A councilor from the Golkar faction, Bandjar Marpaung, agreed with Prawoto.

"We cannot only look at the profit to be made before passing a regulation," he said.

"The administration must improve their services first, before raising parking fees." (02)