Participatory Budgeting

Links to newspaper articles regarding MBPJ Budgeting

6 Oct 2016 MBPJ approves RM397m for Budget 2016

14-September 2016 MyPJ Expectations of MBPJ Budget 2017 (Free Malaysia Today)

 

15 September 2015

MBPJ should institutionalise monitoring of funds and have residents serve on committee.

14 July 2015

IT CANNOT be denied that a cloud of pessimism has descended upon the nation and the general public is experiencing hardship with the increased cost of living, the valuable time wasted on congested roads, and increasing intolerance resulting in mob violence in a shopping complex in Kuala Lumpur.

23 June 2015

BUKIT Gasing assemblyman Rajiv Rishyakaran recently organised the Budget 2016 Preparation Dialogue in PJ Live Arts centre, which attracted about 40 participants.

20 June 2015

ONLY 12 residents turned up at the Petaling Jaya City Council (MBPJ) budget dialogue organised by Bukit Gasing assemblyman Rajiv Rishyakaran.

 

 

The two articles discussed at our meeting are reproduced below

MEDIA STATEMENT (11th September 2015)

MBPJ PUBLIC CONSULTATION ON BUDGET 2016- 14th September 2015

Introduction

The Coalition of Good Governance commends MBPJ for organizing the yearly public consultation on the council’s budget before it is finalized for the coming year. As this concerns money paid by the public and rate payers, meeting like this uphold the spirit of accountability and transparency. It offers also an opportunity for feedback from the public and is an important exercise in community engagement as promoted by Local Agenda 21.

Concerns of Stakeholder

The greatest concern that we have for this year budget dialogue is that the promise by MBPJ of a half yearly public review of 2015 spending has not been honored. In the 2015 budget dialogue, the then Deputy Mayor Tuan Puasa had promised that there will be a half yearly public dialogue that will review the 2015 actual spending’s before the main budget dialogue for 2016 budget.

We would therefore strongly suggest that this coming Monday MBPJ dialogue should be a briefing on the actual half year spending of 2015 and the budget dialogue to be postponed to the following week.

As stakeholders in the Petaling Jaya community we are concerned that the consultation meeting has not met its objective in the past years. Some of the reasons are:

  1. Lack of notice to residents, NGOs and stakeholders. (at least two weeks’ notice)
  2. Lack of Financial Information provided which prevent us from giving meaningful contribution at the meeting. (Information should be provided together with the notice of meeting)
  3. Lack of clear written explanation as to the budget theme, the action plans to implement it and the impact measurement criteria.

The above problems occur because the process of preparing the city council budget does not follow established proven practices. Two important aspects of budgeting are:

  1. Participative Budgeting (Engagement of the public and good feedback before preparing the draft budget)
  2. Budget Monitoring (The regular monthly monitoring of the proposed income and expenditures).

Both of these important aspects have been raised at 2014 and 2015 budget consultation meeting.

As a comparison we would like to note that Penang has led the way onto participatory budgeting in “Projek Penyertaan Rakyat Machang Bubuk” (leaflet attached) while locally the ADUN of Taman Medan YB Haniza has also implemented participatory budgeting for her constituency by going to the ground to collect information on repairs and issues that will need to be included in the MBPJ 2016 budget.

 

Clarifications

For this coming budget consultation meeting stakeholders would like clarification of the following:

  1. Participative Budgeting
    1. The process and explanation in which the council decides on the priority of projects
    2. The list of projects planned for 2016 and time line
    3. The lists of meetings convene by councilors with their residents to get feedback about required works and the total spending in their area.
    4. That the development budget of MBPJ should be identified by councilors wards using “zero-based” budgeting principles which will require specific projects to be identified.
  2. Budget Monitoring
    1. The budget should be presented to residents in tabular format where we are able to see the Actual spending against the budgeted amounts by monthly or quarterly.
    2. The budget monitoring committee was passed by council under the former mayor Dato Roslan but was not implemented effectively. The establishment of the proposed budget monitoring committee should include resident representatives and should be discussed and established at the budget dialogue meeting so that PJ stakeholders are assured of a system looking after the residents.
  3. Determination of Strategic Rakyat Friendly Focused areas

Throughout 2015 there were many embarrassing newspapers articles that highlight the deficiency in services offered by MBPJ.  We highlight here specific issues which require special focus, and therefore demand how these have been strategically addressed by the budget

  1. Of grave concern is the inclusion of MBPJ zones as top dengue hotspots in the country. Fingers are being pointed at MBPJ for failures to address aging drainage infrastructure and the ineffectiveness of the cleaning services
  2. With more traffic being brought into PJ the residents expect more allocations for more public transport friendly infrastructure, more pedestrian walks and more bus stops
  3. The citizens of PJ are greatly affected by the increasing cost of living. As a responsible rakyat friendly local government we expect strategic infrastructure in giving dignity to food courts, wet markets and public parks.

Proposed Approach

We are proposing that this meeting will take a different approach. The Approach where residents are split up into different groups and made to discuss a micro-topic had turned out fruitless for the last four years of budget consultation.

For this budget meeting, we would like to reach an agreement with MBPJ that the process of the budget with regards to participative budgeting and budget monitoring committee be institutionalized. That the budget dialogue focus more on the structure and processes on creating a budget that is realistic with mechanisms to monitor it and that the break out groups of 5 themes be abandoned.

We have never received feedback that our views gathered at the past 3 years theme discussions has found its way into the budget.

That the following figures be presented to the residents and to us for forwarding to our list of stakeholders. The requested figures are:

  1. The list of recommendations from the last consultation that make into the budget
  2. Income and Expenditure Statement Budgeted and Actual spending for 2013, 2014 & 2015(half year). The balance sheet for 2014 should be made available indicating the accumulated reserves of MBPJ due to under spending of the past year budgets allocation.
  3. Balance Sheet of MBPJ indicating the accumulated reserves due to the under spending by the council for the last 3 years.
  4. The list of Development Budget allocated to councilors for their respective areas and the actual amount spent for those proposed projects.
  5. The allocations and initiatives specifically for :
    1. Poverty Alleviation
    2. Maintenance of public housing
    3. Traffic Congestion
    4. Citizenship Education
    5. Public Consultation-Engagement
    6. E-Aduan system
    7. Pedestrian Walks and bus stops
    8. Food courts

 

  1. Written narrative of the budget theme and the action plans to achieve it

Until and unless a new approach to the budget consultation is adopted the Coalition of Good Governace sees the forthcoming exercise to be another futile whitewashing exercise and at best another Public Relation exercise.

 

Coalition of Good Governance

 

For further details of this press statement please call:

012-2347223 Jeffrey Phang Co-Chairman (CGG)

012-2861715 Jerald Joseph (CGG)

012-210 7540 Derek Fernandez (Legal Adviser)

BETTER 2016 BUDGET PROCESSES FOR MBPJ

Rajiv Rishyakaran, ADUN for Bukit Gasing recently launched a Budget dialogue entitled “Budget 2016 Rajiv Budget SessionPreparation Dialogue”. Held at the PJ Live Arts centre on 11th June 2016 it attracted about 40 participants. The dialogue is a success in setting the trend for public budget feedback. Out of 13 areas of budgetary concerns the top 4 were CCTV in public areas, Road Maintenance and Repairs, Increase efficiency, transparency, and accountability of MBPJ enforcement system independent of existing MBPJ systems; and Waste Management Education. It was also good that the budget dialogue is held early just as preparation for 2016 budget starts.

 

MBPJ may be the only council to organize public budget dialogues and they are to be commended for carrying on this tradition. Last year MBPJ budget dialogue was held on 23rd September 2014, and the Coalition of Good Governance issued a press statement a day before the dialogue. The opening paragraphs of the press statement stated:

Concerns of Stakeholder

As stakeholders in the Petaling Jaya community we are concerned that the consultation meeting has not met its objective in the past years. Some of the reasons are:

  1. Lack of notice to residents, NGOs and stakeholders.
  2. Lack of Financial Information provided which prevent us from giving meaningful contribution at the meeting.
  3. Lack of clear written explanation as to the budget theme and the action plans to achieve it.

The above problems occur because the process of preparing the city council budget does not follow established proven practices. Two important aspects of budgeting are:

  1. Participative Budgeting (Engagement of the public and good feedback before preparing the draft budget)
  2. Budget Monitoring (The regular monthly monitoring of the proposed income and expenditures).

The 2014 dialogue was slightly more successful as the then deputy mayor Tuan Puasa adopted a more open approach and had released more financial data at the dialogue itself. He had also assured that in 2015 there will be a public mid-year budget review which we will expect in late July or early August 2015.

While residents were broken up into thematic groups and given a limited time to debate their needs, this manner of organization is really a “red-herring” situation creating the impression that residents were contributing towards the budget process when actually it is just a public relations exercise with residents not really appreciating the impacts that budget have on the well being of PJ residents.

One particular group organized themselves into a Budget Process grouping to expound on the importance of getting the budget process right. Tuan Puasa was kind enough to provide the opportunity for the group to share its findings.

The group highlighted that there were budget processes that were fundamentally wrong. They are:

  1. Budget estimates are based on incremental budgets instead of zero-based budget. This means that many of the development or operational budgets are based on rough estimates with no breakdown of the anticipated projects in which the residents and ADUNs feel are important for their constituencies. As a result at the start of every year when fresh budgets are available for spending, many projects are delayed or even not carried out as Head of Departments try to negotiate priorities and councilors try to win cooperation to get their ward projects to start first. This is both an unhealthy and unproductive practice.
  2. After budgets are created the monitoring process is flawed. The budget monitoring committee pushed by ex-councilor Derek Fernandez was well accepted by the then MBPJ mayor Datuk Mohamad Roslan Sakiman. Without the independent presence of residents sitting on the committee, MBPJ is perceived as being non-accountable and non-transparent. The ex-mayor Datin Alinah Ahmad refused to institutionalize this budget monitoring committee and with a promise to the board of councilors took upon herself to monitor the budget spending and ensure that all development budgets are spent. History has shown that she has failed in the promise and MBPJ is now saddled with over 300 million of unspent money in reserves. Unlike corporate companies, the holding of these reserves is immoral as it translates to the city council collecting money from the public which they were unable to spend.

At the budget meeting last year, development budget for 2013 was only 16% of the total budget of MBPJ, yet only 35% of the budget was spent.

While for 2014, at the time of the public dialogue only 3% out of the total 16% of the development budget was spent. When budgets are not spent consistently over the months, there is a temptation for over spending at the year-end to compensate for the inactivity of the earlier months.

With the momentum created by the budget dialogue of DUN Bukit Gasing, a sense of optimism is in the air that the official 2015 MBPJ budget dialogue will be more impactful and more people centric. The process that will be taken will hopefully involve better public participation.

The presence of new mayor Tuan Mohd Azizi bin Mohd Zain and his deputy mayor Tuan Johary bin Anuar gives hope that a transition to a more people-centric MBPJ may be possible and expectations are high that they can steer MBPJ away from the traditional method of measuring activities to one that measures the positive impacts that MBPJ have on its residents. It all starts with the formulation of the 2016 budget as this is the instrument that detail all action plans for 2016.