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Residents kick up stink over Bandung garbage fee proposal
The Jakarta Post , Jakarta | Thu, 05/10/2007 7:29 AM
Yuli Tri Suwarni, The Jakarta Post, Bandung
With piles of uncollected trash sitting on roadsides in Bandung, West Java, the city's sanitation office has proposed a 60 to 100 percent hike in garbage collection fees.
Awan Gumilar, director of the office, said Wednesday the proposed fee increase, which would depend on the distance from the collection site to the dump, was being discussed by the Bandung Legislative Council.
""The trash collection fee has not been raised since 2002 even though the price of fuel has been hiked twice.""
With a stench hanging over the city from the piles of uncollected garbage, the second trash crisis in Bandung in the last year, the proposal has not been met with much enthusiasm on the part of residents.
A radio talk show on Wednesday received numerous irate phone calls over the plan. All of the callers were in agreement that the sanitation office was in no position to raise its fees given the poor quality of its service.
Resident Vivin Lavianti, 35, said people needed an assurance that trash collection would be more reliable before the fee went up. She said now customers paid the fee but didn't get the service.
""Once I was not allowed to dump trash in a temporary dump site because they said it was already full. How can that happen?""
Under the proposal, household trash collection fees of between Rp 2,000 (22 US cents) and Rp 7,000 per month would be raised to Rp 3,000 to Rp 20,000, Awan said.
For commercial buildings like malls, hotels and offices, the collection fee would go up from Rp 15,000 per cubic meter of trash a month to Rp 60,000. Public premises like hospitals and schools would see their garbage fees rise from Rp 15,000 per cubic meter to Rp 50,000.
Awan said the proposal was submitted to the Bandung Legislative Council at the end of last year.
""Transportation costs for the trash are very expensive now because of the long distance between Bandung and the city's dump at Sarimukti. Bandung may have the longest distance of any city in Indonesia to its dump site,"" he said.
Early last year the city's dump was moved from Leuwigajah in 2005 after a massive pile of trash gave way and buried a number of residents.
As a result, garbage trucks must now travel 60 kilometers, instead of 16, to dump their trash.
The city sanitation office says its operational costs this year will be Rp 46 billion. It receives Rp 32 billion from the regional budget, with the remaining Rp 14 billion having to be raised through trash collection fees.
