Parking firms required to pay 20% of revenue to city administration
Ahmad Junaidi, The Jakarta Post, Jakarta
The effort to increase city revenue moved forward on Thursday when the City Council approved a bylaw requiring parking management firms to pay 20 percent of their total income to the city administration.
"But the city administration should not think only of the possible revenue, but also how to improve parking services," Indonesian Democratic Party of Struggle (PDI Perjuangan) faction spokesman Tarmidi Edy Suwarno said during the council's plenary session.
Tarmidi suggested the administration provide insurance for vehicle owners as one way to improve service.
He did not provide further details but he may have been thinking of the councillors' earlier visit to Surabaya, where parking tickets come with insurance.
Very few parking operators in the city provide a security guarantee for their customers, and they refuse to take responsibility for the damage or loss of vehicles.
The city categorizes parking as either on-street or off- street, which is on private property and requires all vehicle owners to pay a parking fee.
With the approval of the bylaw, the city administration is expecting to receive Rp 24 billion (US$2.6 million) per year from the firms that manage off-street parking and parking lots in buildings.
The money will be collected from 420 locations, comprising 124,470 parking spaces: 90,544 parking spaces for cars and 35,926 for motorcycles.
The current decree on parking requires car owners to pay Rp 1,000 for the first two hours and an additional Rp 1,000 for every additional hour, while motorcycles owners pay Rp 500.
The city has, in the past, had difficulty collecting taxes from parking management companies, which are required to pay some 25 percent of their parking revenue to the city, as stipulated in a gubernatorial decree. However, these companies regard the decree as a non-binding regulation.
The city had hoped to collect Rp 3.4 billion from parking management companies this year, but has only managed to collect Rp 1.1 billion.
The companies refuse to pay because of what they say is the absence of a binding regulation, and also because they claim they have already paid 10 percent income tax to the central government.
On-street is managed by the City Parking Body (BP Parkir), which contributed Rp 7 billion to the city's coffers this year of a targeted Rp 28 billion.
The dismal performance of BP Parkir is particularly disappointing to the city because it is a heavily subsidized company.
"We suggest the administration liquidate BP Parkir for its poor performance," United Development Party (PPP) faction spokesman Ali Imran Hussein said during the council's plenary session.