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akarta Deputy Governor Djarot Saiful Hidayat has suggested that the city administration ask private developers to take on 45 delayed school-building renovation projects because of previous bidding failures.

Djarot said after a meeting with top city officials at City Hall on Monday that private developers should take over school renovations as a part of fulfilling their obligations in relation to their commercial building permits.

The obligation as stipulated in the permit usually has obligated developers to construct low-cost apartments.

“The renovation can be funded by the developers, so we do not have to conduct a tender process anymore,” he said.

He added that the renovations were urgent as most of the buildings were no longer appropriate for school activities.

Giving projects to developers has become a new habit of the city administration to speed up infrastructure development.

The city now obliges developers to build various public works projects in exchange for acquiring a permit — for example, in the Jakarta Bay reclamation projects — or if they had a project that breached its building floor-to-area ratio (KLB) limit.

Djarot said he believed that letting developers execute the renovations would be cheaper and faster.

He used the example of the Rawa Bebek low-cost apartment in East Jakarta, whose development was taken over by a developer fulfilling its permit obligation. He said the end construction was fast and good.

“We sometimes spend a lot of funds for an inefficient and average result. Many [city-managed] construction processes have also suffered delays,” he said.

If using the city budget, the city administration has to put the project in a bidding process through the Goods and Services Procurement Agency (BPPBJ) where private developers can bid for the project’s construction. The process is known to be slow.

Education Agency head Sopan Adrianto said 45 school renovation projects had been delayed because the bidding process was too close to the expected completion date.

“The winning bids were just announced in August. It meant that they only had three-and-a-half months to conduct the projects,” he said.

He said the agency considered three-and-a-half months as not enough time for the renovations, so the agency canceled the contracts.

Sopan said his agency had allocated Rp 1.04 trillion (US$79.04 million) this year for 83 renovation projects. Only 38 projects could be carried out this year.