D

espite a confident start, the Jakarta administration'€™s budget appears to be facing further delays.

Governor Basuki '€œAhok'€ Tjahaja Purnama said the city administration had just submitted the final draft of the 2016 budget on Monday, after a week of making last-minute changes to the draft.

Ahok said almost all working units included dubious allocations, which prompted him to check the draft budget over the past two weeks. Ahok called in all technical working units to his office to discuss their draft budgets.

'€œWe have completed and submitted the draft to the councilors. Hopefully they can discuss it quickly so we can have the MoU [memorandum of understanding] soon,'€ Ahok told reporters at City Hall on Monday.

Previously, the city administration had aimed at signing an MoU with the city council on the preliminary budget priorities on Nov. 23. The final budget draft was to be approved on Nov. 30, and would have been submitted to the Home Ministry for evaluation and approval.

However, after finding dubious allocations submitted by his subordinates, Ahok delayed the MoU signing to continue scrutinizing the preliminary draft.

On the other hand, the city council refused to discuss the draft budget that had been scrutinized and changed after the working units'€™ meeting with Ahok, as they had already received a different draft beforehand.

The councilors demanded that the administration notify them of changes through an official letter.

When asked whether or not he anticipated another deadlock and delay, Ahok claimed that the city council was '€œmore cooperative'€ and said that he was not worried.

'€œI think the councilors are much more cooperative now. We'€™re scrutinizing the budget together,'€ he said.

Earlier this year, the city administration and the City Council became embroiled in a bitter dispute over the 2015 draft budget. Ahok accused the councilors of including in their draft dubious allocations worth Rp 12.1 trillion (US$874 million) of the total Rp 73.08 trillion.

As a result, the Jakarta administration for the first time issued a budget without approval from the City Council. The conflict was finally resolved in April, when the Home Ministry approved the Jakarta budget at Rp 69.2 trillion. The delayed approval was partly responsible for the year'€™s low spending, with funds not distributed to working units until July.

Separately, City Council speaker Prasetyo Edi Marsudi of the Indonesian Democratic Party of Struggle (PDI-P) said the council was currently discussing the latest draft submitted by the city administration, a process which may take weeks.

Prasetyo said the councilors were committed to ensuring a '€œclean'€ draft budget.

He said that the council had hired a private auditor to scrutinize the preliminary city budget and found a total of Rp 1.88 trillion in questionable allocations.

'€œI'€™ve communicated the audit report to the governor. It is clear that we both want the 2016 budget to be clean. The councilors are currently discussing the final budget draft submitted by the city administration,'€ Prasetyo told reporters in his office in Central Jakarta on Monday.

He insisted that neither he nor any other councilor had '€œpersonal interests'€ in the city budget, and that he sought to help the city administration and the City Council fix its old habits of seeking personal gains from the city budget.

'€œRest assured that I have no personal interest in this. We will speed up discussions on the draft so we can quickly sign an MoU and have it approved,'€ Prasetyo said.