Overseas trip findings of limited use: Councillors

JAKARTA (JP): City councillors who went on a comparative study trip about disaster management in Japan and China officially acknowledged on Friday that the results could not be applied here.

Deputy chairman of Commission A for legal and administrative affairs Syarifien Maloko said it was not feasible to build a crisis center like the one in Tokyo, which the councillors visited last week during their seven-day trip.

"We learnt that the center has only been used three times to handle disasters, such as earthquakes, in the past 10 years. We think it is not urgent to build such a crisis center," Syarifien said.

He also stated that Jakarta could not implement an integral system as applied by Tokyo's fire headquarters.

He said the fire headquarters could reach a fire scene within five minutes due to supportive urban planning and design, whereas urban planning and design in Jakarta does not support the fire department in this way.

"We have many cases where there is very little access for our fire agency to reach a fire location because of poor urban design and layout," Syarifien of the Crescent and Star Party said.

He denied, however, that the trip -- which attracted widespread public criticism, as it was considered inefficient and a waste of money -- was useless, saying that it had widened his knowledge.

Council chairman Edy Waluyo said that following the trip, the city council would reject a proposal to build a similar crisis center in the city.

"It's better to have spent hundreds of millions of rupiah on the trip than to build a crisis center that would cost billions of rupiah," Edy told reporters.

All the 18 councillors involved in the trip denied that they went just for fun.

"Don't make an accusation that the trip was purely for pleasure because we spent only two days (visiting tourist attractions)," Commission A chairman Binsar Tambunan said, with emotion.

Binsar then hit back, saying that a planned foreign trip due to be made by some City Hall journalists would also be financed by the city budget.

He also complained that his wife and children had been mocked by neighbors because of newspaper reports on the controversial foreign trip.

It was reported that besides visiting the crisis center and the fire headquarters, the councillors spent most of their time at tourist attractions.

The 2001 city budget has allocated Rp 12 billion for councillors' domestic and foreign trips. More than half of the funds have been depleted.

A councillor is scheduled to take at least two foreign trips per year.

Two Indonesian consulates in Madrid and Los Angeles recently sent letters to the City Council, saying that the councillors' trips, respectively to study garbage management and entertainment tax, had not been effective.(jun)