Ipoh City Watch Forum...."Restructuring Local Councils."

Restructuring local councils.....a popular topic now given the new political climate..and it showed with a good attendance....that and the fact that the speakers were prominent and well versed on issues of local councils....

Below the ICW Chairman Mr Chan Kok Sun giving his wellcoming address.....He posed a good question...'we asked for change...are we the citizens of Ipoh ready to change.."

The MP for Ipoh Barat M Kulasegaran (m kulas speech is linked) giving a speech to the forum participants....he gave some great suggestions on the way local councils should be run....such as

1. Have council meetings after office hours .
2. Attire at the meetings to be informal.
3. Sub committee meetings to be open to the public.
4. Meeting minutes to be posted on the internet for public feedback....
.....all the above suggestions sounded great to me.....lets hope it is implemented....

The Forum speakers (L to R) Dr Goh Ban Lee ( local council expert), Derek Fernandez (legal expert on local councils) and the infamous investigative journalist R Nadeswaran

This speaker Derek..hilited alot of guidelines ......

...like such......

.......even the local council spec has a guideline on how to appoint a councilman...apparently the previous government never followed the SOP.....

..that should explain why most of the councilors were invisible????

..he goes on to further suggest that ..'non government revenue must be maximized and profit generating..it must not be privatized......if the local councils can control 50% of the leakage...there will be an increase in revenue...and can be put to good use...bonuses given to employees!!..."

..Citizen Nades touched on the wrongdoings of the local council..he gave a funny example..."a hawkers license being issued to an address along Tiger Lane..." very good one...



..some interesting participants during the Q&A were these students from Sunway ( Michelle & Pang ) who posed some questions to the speakers.....Both Derek and Nades were glad to see young faces mentioning that alot of the new politicians now are actually quite young.....

..this group of students did a working paper for this forum targeting the 18-25 years group ...below are some of their findings and suggestions ..(pls click on the pages to enlarge)
..some points that struck me...*Education... * Recreation & Social activities..Rakan Muda...is not active..??? really...

..*Communication.."it is a challenge to obtain info on the developments in Ipoh????..."and **Infrastructure...buses are inadequate..broken bus stands...bad timing...all the basic expectations of the rakyat...interesting...even the young are frustrated....

and their question....." Will the new local councilors ensure a better administration??"
Well Mr Kula was there representing the new government...lets see...and Derek asked this question twice..."where are all the state assemblymen??"......

cheers!

kk