The Petaling Jaya City Council (MBPJ) is becoming increasingly opaque in its dealings, according to a coalition of residents’ associations called MyPJ.

The group said the city council is due to hold its annual budget dialogue on Sept 26, but residents and local councillors are still in the dark on the latest financial figures.

“For a meaningful dialogue, information on MBPJ’s 2016 audited reports, up-to-date reports on expenditures, and the planned budget for the coming year, as requested in our letter dated Sept 11, 2017, to the mayor, have to be made available without having to invoke the Freedom of Information Enactment 2011.

“Regretfully, the requested reports are not available to date,” MyPJ representative Esham Salam (photo) said today.

Another MyPJ representative, Jeffrey Phang, said the former Petaling Jaya mayor, Mohamad Roslan Sakiman, used to publish annual reports and other data on the council’s operations.

“Since Roslan’s day, they used to provide the MBPJ report (that said), ‘Here is our spending, and this is what we did; qualitative data on how it impacted the people are there.’ No more (is the case now with the present administration).

“Since Roslan left, they don’t publish all that. We are getting to see that things are getting less and less transparent,” Phang said.

He added that the 2016 audited financial reports should have been made available on MBPJ’s website.

Roslan was Petaling Jaya mayor until he was transferred on Oct 1, 2012.

Local elections are forgotten

The group also complained that the Pakatan Harapan leaders no longer talk about local council elections.

Phang said the appointment of NGO representatives to the local council, which was supposed to be a stop-gap measure, has been reduced to only one or two posts in MBPJ out of 24 posts.

Harapan’s predecessor Pakatan Rakyat in 2008 pledged to allocate a 25 percent quota for NGOs and professionals in Selangor local councillor positions, in lieu of local elections. This would mean six NGO and professional representatives in MBPJ.

“Unfortunately, it has been a downhill degradation on (public) participation. It (local election) is not even mentioned now in ceramah.

“We want to remind the menteri besar and the politicians that this is (the sort of) structural change that we need today,” Esham said.

The group also urged MBPJ to itemise the allocations that it had made in its development budget allocations, instead of specifying a lump sum for development.

MyPJ representative Eric Chew (photo) said it is a good practice to find out what residents want, and only then allocate budgets for those projects. Instead, MBPJ allocates 13 percent of its budget for unspecified development.

“So, you will never get your development done, and your development depends on how good the councillor is with the head of the town.

"If you are friendly with me, then yes, I’ll give some priority to your town.

“This is a very haphazard way of doing development, and not very effective,” Chew said.

He claimed that when state assemblypersons take the initiative to engage with residents and draw up proposals for projects, even with MBPJ's agreement, the projects fail to show in the budget with a specific allocation. 

He also claimed that each year, only 60 percent of the money that MBPJ had budgeted would have been spent, meaning the spending had been inefficient.

Chew said this had led MBPJ rushing to spend the remaining money by the end of the year, especially before the December holidays. As a result, contracts have been poorly specified and contractors poorly selected.

Even then, some money remained unspent by the end of the year. Phang said this totalled approximately RM500 million between 2011 and 2014.