Council sets yet another deadline for spatial plan

The Jakarta Council is targeting to have finished deliberating the much-awaited Spatial Planning draft bylaw by the end of the month.

Triwisaksana, the chairman of the council’s regional legislation committee, said Friday that the council chairmen would hold a meeting to discuss the bylaw next Thursday.

“We are targeting to have approved the bill before the Idul Fitri holidays [which is expected to fall on Aug. 30 and 31],” Triwisaksana, a councilor from the Prosperous Justice Party (PKS), said.

The City Council has repeatedly delayed endorsing the 2010-2030 spatial planning bill, which was supposed to be approved last year, missing its own targets of delivering the bill in January and then in June this year.

The bill sets an outline on how the capital should be developed over the next 20 years.

“I hope this time we can reach the target; we have failed to keep our promise a number of times,” the councilor said.

Triwisaksana said that the council would add and revise a number of articles in the Spatial Planning bill presented by the city administration.

Among the articles were those discussing potential green areas in the city, which should be created in accordance with the 2007 Spatial Planning, which mandates that every city set aside 20 percent of its urban land for public green areas and another 10 percent for private ones.

Despite having made no major gains in achieving its initial goal, the city administration has said it aims for 34.51 percent of the city to be green space by 2030 — a major adjustment from the previous target of 13.94 percent.

The Council, Triwisaksana said, was also pushing for more proportional distribution of the city’ population, implementing a zoning system and more rigorous requirements for the planned northern coast reclamation project.

The administration has been planning to reclaim areas in the form of islets, spanning Green Beach, Kapuk Naga Indah, Angke, Mutiara, Sunda Kelapa, Ancol, Tanjung Priok and Marunda on the north coast.

The projects would affect 32 kilometers of coastline in total, covering 2,700 hectares of land extending 1.5 kilometers out from the coast.

The 2007 Spatial Planning Law requires that each province submit proposals for new spatial plans two years after being issued, while regencies or cities have three years to submit plans.

Jakarta has failed to meet the December 2010 deadline.

Separately, Wiriyatmoko, head of the City Spatial Planning Agency, said that the city had submitted a complete bill to the council.

“Substantially, we believe there is no problem with the bill, but we have to abide by the regulation that the bill should go through a political process where it is reviewed and discussed by the 94 members of Council,” he said.

Wiriyatmoko said that although the city technically had no Spatial Planning to refer to because the previous Spatial Planning bylaw expired in December last year, the administration had received dispensation from the Home Ministry.

“The Ministry issued a decree in April stating that the administration can still issue building and construction permits in accordance with the previous Spatial Planning while waiting for the new one,” he said.

Activists have blasted the Jakarta administration’s Spatial Planning bill, saying that the draft discussions have not involved the public and have failed to address a number of important issues.

Experts say that in the past few years, there has been no adequate monitoring of the administration’s policies on spatial planning, and as a result the bill does not accommodate the public’s needs, and especially those of the poor.