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Owners put high hopes on new apartment management decree
Gubernatorial decree No. 133/2019 is a revision of a 2018 decree.
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Apartment towers fill Jakarta's cityscape. (tempo.co/Tony Hartawan)
L
ilis has been living in a privately owned apartment at Mediterania Palace Residences in Kemayoran, Central Jakarta, since 2008. She had lived in peace until the issuance of Gubernatorial Decree No. 132/2018 obliging residents to form an Apartment Owners and Tenants Association (P3SRS), after which the terrors began.
A P3SRS is tasked with handling the management of an apartment building, including the water and environmental maintenance fee (IPL), which was previously handled by a similar body called an Apartment Tenants Association (PPRS).
The problem was that in many cases the members of the PPRS were mostly people affiliated with the apartment developers. Consequently, many management decisions failed to consider the best interests of the apartment owners, and many decisions were made without much transparency, including arbitrarily rising the IPL from time to time without providing residents with justification as to why it was necessary.
“Residents still do not feel secure because they [accomplices of developers] terrorize us every night. They hand out flyers to our apartments and threaten to cut off electricity and water just like before,” Lilis told The Jakarta Post on Friday.
She was referring to an incident that happened in May this year, a month after the P3SRS in her apartment building had received instruction from the administration to handle building management. The electricity and water to her and many other residents’ apartments were cut off for 30 days.
“My kids had to go to the swimming pool facility to shower every morning [before going to school]. I had to carry water from the facility [in buckets] to store in my apartment upstairs. For 30 days my kids studied and prayed using candles.”
Since management was handed over to the new body, the kind of incidents that happened previously have been rampant, allegedly carried out by the PPRS in an effort to regain control.
