The rambling city budget

The rambling city budget

One thing that never fails to surprise people about the
spending allocations in Jakarta's annual provincial budget is the
carryovers in development funds. In the 2001 budget, for example,
Rp 1.6 trillion of the total Rp 8.14 trillion in development
funds remained unused. In the following year about Rp 2 trillion,
from a total Rp 9.7 trillion, was left over.

From one point of view, those leftovers may reflect the
administration's financial prudence. From another, however, it
shows the administration's lack of a sense of crisis, and a
failure to use the development budget appropriately.

To judge by the ratio between routine expenditure -- which
included health allowances for councillors amounting to Rp 50
million a year for each legislator in 2002, as well as official
trips -- and the expenditure on development, those two budgets
mentioned also showed that the administration was not siding with
the people's interests.

The 2001 budget allocated Rp 5.51 trillion to routine
expenditure, reserving the remainder for development, including
education and infrastructure projects, and clothing allowances
for both councillors and executives. Routine expenditure in the
2002 budget amounted to a total of Rp 5.6 trillion, while the
remaining Rp 3.29 trillion was set aside for development.

Ironically, too, those small development budgets were not all
used up on development programs. Somehow, it is difficult to
accept that whereas the entire routine budgets were all used up,
invariably part of the development budget remained unused.

Unfortunately, this year's budget is no less irrational than
those two previous budgets. The City Council has just approved an
additional amount of Rp 576.942 billion in additional funds to
fatten the total budget this year to a total Rp 11.563 trillion
(approximately US$1.3 billion).

As was the case in the two previous budget years, the city
administration spent less than 25 percent of the budget in the
first semester of this year (before revision). This leaves us no
option but to conclude that this lower expenditure -- including
in the two previous budget years -- can only indicate the
administration's poor performance in carrying out development
projects for public welfare. Even lay people would have asked how
there could have been surpluses in development expenditure while
so many matters relating to public services continue to require
prompt attention.

To look at it in a simple and realistic way: The
administration had Rp 1.6 trillion left over from its 2001 budget
and Rp 2.6 trillion from its 2002 budget, yet it always
complained about a lack of money to purchase garbage trucks and
fire engines. The fire department, meanwhile, received only Rp 2
billion from the 2002 budget for its operations; we cannot expect
this vital service to perform as expected because it has only 150
old fire engines, of which 15 are in poor condition. Ideally, the
city should have at least 265 fire trucks. Let us say a new fire
engine costs Rp 3 billion: The administration could have spent at
least Rp 6 billion on two new ones last year.

Garbage is another pressing problem for this capital city. The
city sanitation office can dispose of only 14,700 cubic meters of
the 23,400 cubic meters of garbage that are produced daily by its
residents. This means that at least 260,000 cubic meters of
rubbish remain uncollected and undisposed of every month. The
explanation is hardly a surprise: The agency has only 700 trucks,
while it needs at least 1,200 to do the job. In the current
budget the sanitation agency gets less than Rp 300 billion to
improve its services and purchase new garbage trucks. With a
leftover of Rp 2 trillion, the administration could have
purchased several new garbage trucks and the sanitation and
garbage services could have been improved.

Development of infrastructure is another problem. Most rivers,
gutters and canals are clogged and covered with garbage. Why
didn't the decision makers think of setting aside some of the
annual budget leftovers for cleaning up those rivers and canals?
It is difficult to avoid the conclusion that the authorities have
no sympathy for the public's perennial headaches.

What should we conclude from all this? While we appreciate the
administration's all-out efforts to develop the city and make its
residents more prosperous, we have to say that the authorities
lack a genuine sense of crisis. We must also conclude that the
officials have shown an inability to use the money set aside by
the budget to appropriate projects, which -- ironically -- they
planned before the annual budget was proposed.

It is therefore time that our city administration officials
become more sensitive and mindful of the public's needs.
Jakarta's citizens have so far not been involved in any public
discussion on development plans before the expenditure has been
proposed in the annual budget.