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Batam Council backs city on reef protection
The Batam City Council will support the Batam city administration's plan to end mooring services for large, foreign freighters above coral reefs around the Rempang and Galang Islands in Riau province
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he Batam City Council will support the Batam city administration's plan to end mooring services for large, foreign freighters above coral reefs around the Rempang and Galang Islands in Riau province.
A member of the council's Commission I on legal affairs, Yudi Kurnain, said Friday the council was supporting policies the administration would pursue on the matter.
"We *the council* will push the Batam administration to take tough measures if the Transportation Ministry and the BPK-FTZ Batam *Batam free trade zone management body* continue to ignore *our* aspirations," the councillor said.
"*The administration* can use its police civil unit, or coordinate with the Navy to evict the offending foreign vessels from the ports in Batam."
Batam Deputy Mayor Ria Saptarika said he had sent a letter to the Transportation Ministry asking it to stop providing mooring services in the area as research by a Batam Environmental Agency (Bappedalda) team shows it is destroying the surrounding underwater environment.
The research team, he said, found the private mooring services company, working with the BPK-FTZ Batam, was operating above coral reefs and their buffer areas.
"We are asking the Transportation Ministry to temporarily halt the mooring services before too many vessels moor there."
He said the administration also demanded involvement in determining the location of and amount of fees collected from these services, which currently contribute nothing to city revenues.
Ria said the central government must rule justly, according to the 1999 Law on the forming of Batam City, which stipulates that the Batam Industrial Development Authority (BIDA) - now known as BPK-FTZ Batam - is just one of a number of parties involved in the development of Batam city.
Dwi Djoko Wiwoho, head of the public affairs division at BPK-FTZ Batam, however refuted the agency's study, saying his office and a Transportation Ministry team had carried out a study before allowing vessels to moor in the waters.
He said his study found waters in the area were 20 to 50 meters deep, ideal for large vessels to moor in.
"It's also untrue that *the moorings* are endangering coral reefs because we also have done a study on that," he said.
