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The Say No to Dash (SNTD) Damansara group is utterly disappointed that the Selangor state exco has instructed the Petaling Jaya City Council (MBPJ) to re-insert the Damansara-Shah Alam Expressway (Dash) into the Petaling Jaya Local Plan 2 (RTPJ2) for discussion.

According to Petaling Jaya mayor Mohd Azizi Mohd Zain, the last part of the highway involving Damansara Perdana and Mutiara Damansara would be marked with a ‘dotted line’ and the residents in these two areas would no longer be asked for feedback.

The instructions from the state government was to have the Malaysian Highway Authority (LLM) look at alternative routes and concurrently continue negotiations with the residents of Damansara Perdana and Mutiara Damansara to obtain agreement and consent to allow the highway to go through this part of the neighbourhood.

This decision was reached on April 29 and confirmed on May 13, 2015 by the Selangor government and supersedes and nullifies the earlier decision by MBPJ to remove the highway from discussion altogether.

While there appears to be many clauses attached to allow the Dash highway to be discussed, the residents are getting weary and wary of this entire exercise as the objection against Dash going through Damansara Perdana and Mutiara Damansara was a loud “No!” since April 2012.

What we find objectionable to this exercise is the failure of our assemblyperson Elizabeth Wong in representing the residents properly in this exercise. When we gave her more than 5,000 protest signatures in 2012, she vowed to ensure that Dash would be thrown out of Damansara Perdana and Mutiara Damansara.

“We did not authorise this highway. You look at the Selangor Structure Plan, you look at the recently gazetted local plan... for Petaling Jaya 2... there are no highways in the entire plan,” said Wong in 2012.

Yet here we are today with Dash being inserted into the amendments for RTPJ2 and the Selangor Structure Plan 2035.

It is now 2015 and we have compiled more than 7,000 objection signatures to date, met with the relevant authorities and politicians and presented legal reasons and technical studies to prove why the project is bad for the neighbourhood. We also managed to obtain the Environmental Impact Assessment and Traffic Impact Assessment Reports to show that the document was filled with flawed and fabricated data and contained numerous inconsistencies and contradictions.

We have repeatedly stated we do not want this project going through a mature township, which means no going through our area or any other part of Petaling Jaya that is developed. We repeated this message for three years straight, and the Selangor government still wants to subject us to more arbitrary negotiation exercises.

Just how many times does the Selangor government need us to mobilise and say “No”?

A simple issue of residents’ rights

This ‘on again, off again, on again’ status for Dash is tiring for us as non-partisan, non-political residents to deal with. This isn’t a Barisan Nasional versus Pakatan Rakyat popularity contest. It is a simple issue of residents’ rights and the repeated failure of both BN and Pakatan in coming to our defence.

It is this very reason that we have gone back to our fellow residents to tell them we will start a fundraising campaign to hire a lawyer and we would like to thank Zaid Ibrahim who had graciously agreed to sponsor the initial costs.

This is not an ultimatum but a reality for us because we really do not know where Pakatan is leaning towards in this situation.

Simply put, the residents are just asking, “Will the MB now walk his talk and as a final call, make good his promise to the residents?” We want a government that would not gamble our homes and lives away. Enough is enough.

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