Selangor bucks pressure over council criteria

The Selangor government today became the first state government to release its selection and evaluation criteria and process for local councillors.

This comes after much pressure from the Coalition of NGOs and Professionals Appointed Councillors (Conpac) over transparency.

But the state government's revelation leaves much to be desired, according to the group's chairperson Tan Jo Hann (left).

“Most of the criteria are so subjective that you can put anyone ther [...] and now we have two-bit hustlers as councillors,” said the councillor whose term is ending this month.

According to a statement by the state government today, members of the twelve local councils are to be selected based on what the state admits to be a 'qualitative and arbitrary' 3C criteria, namely:

Capacity - Including having sufficient time to attend formal and informal meetings and to communicate with local residents.

Capability - Must have sound technical, professional and/or communitarian knowledge.

Character - Must be of sound and good character.

Tan, a Subang Jaya councillor, expressed disappointment over the selection process as revealed, saying it falls short of Conpac’s recommendations.

Position as political reward

“What we want is to be part of the process to finalise the list of nominees from the NGO pool.

“Right now, NGOs nominate someone and we don’t know what happens, meaning if they make it to the shortlist or not,” he said, adding that they been pushing for this for two years.  

He added that the one-third ‘NGO and professionals’ benchmark was also questionable as he knows of party representatives who were nominated in the NGO category as a political reward.

At present, two-thirds of local councillor candidates are selected from political party nominations while the remainder are selected from a pool nominated by NGOs, professional bodies and organisations.

The final selection is then made by the menteri besar, upon recommendation from the state exco member responsible for local government.

Conpac also has disagreements with the term-end evaluation process, which is done based on the 3C criteria by the mayor, a state assemblyperson and a parliamentarian.

'Let residents judge'

“Why should the mayor evaluate us? He only meets us during meetings and is the person we usually have to go against since he was appointed by the previous state government,” he said.

Tan added that the areas which the mayor evaluated them on, including commitment, communication skills, leadership and pro-activeness, were better judged by the residents.

“The right people to evaluate us are the residents association members and they will gladly say ‘Jo Hann didn’t do this' or 'he is bad at this’ […] it is a basic notion of democracy,” he said.