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Jakarta tightens belt ahead of year-end as councilors scrutinize budget priorities
Saefullah said the administration was currently racking its brains to minimize unnecessary spending until year-end.
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Jakarta Governor Anies Baswedan and members of the Jakarta City Council attend a special plenary meeting to celebrate Jakarta's 492nd anniversary on June 22, 2019. (Antara/Nova Wahyudi)
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span arial="" style="font-family:">The Jakarta administration and the new City Council have kicked off deliberation of the draft 2020 city budget priorities and ceiling (KUA-PPAS) and plan to hold a meeting marathon amid mounting pressure to complete it before Nov. 30, a deadline set by the Home Ministry.
The administration has proposed to the new councilors a budget ceiling of Rp 89.44 trillion (US$6.35 billion), a Rp 6.4 trillion decline from the previous draft submitted in July to the previous city councilors. As the deliberation of the draft was stalled during the previous period, it proceeded to the new members of the city council who were inaugurated on Aug. 26.
City secretary Saefullah said the administration and the city council had agreed to speed up the deliberations to meet the deadline. He also argued that the proposed budget ceiling was often revised during budgetary planning.
The city administration revealed that the decline in the proposed budget ceiling was due to Rp 6.39 trillion in profit-sharing funds that had not yet been disbursed by the central government. The administration should have received Rp 18.1 trillion in total from the central government.
“The Rp 6.39 trillion [profit-sharing fund] is the central government’s debt to be paid to the city administration in 2020. We still don’t know when the fund will be disbursed to us,” he told reporters at City Hall on Thursday.
