THE saying goes that there’s money to be made from rubbish — about RM52 million a year, for removing waste from residents’ homes in Petaling Jaya. On the surface, the waste-management system is simple. Contractors move around collecting waste from urban areas and transport it to a landfill, far away from city folks. Once it […]
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Protecting residents’ gold mine
By KW MakCorrected on 20 Oct 2008 at 10pm PALM Spring @ Damansara in Petaling Jaya is a nice little condominium with some 2,180 condo units. With each unit paying between RM150 and RM200 per month in maintenance fees, the annual collection comes up to around RM4 million. This example is meant to illustrate the potential gold […]
Rubbish!
By KW MakIN this exciting episode of Ampersand, I shall talk about waste management, the local authority, and how our tax money is being used to get the dirty job done (pardon the pun). Charming… (© John Nyberg / sxc.hu) For the longest time, solid waste removal was a job handled by the Petaling Jaya Municipal Council […]
System failure
By KW MakACCORDING to the Local Government Act 1976, councillors are akin to a board of directors. Our role is to devise policies and guidelines that will make the council function better. Being a councillor is not meant to be a full-time job to troubleshoot and resolve all the issues that arise for residents. Construction (© Ajay […]
Condo pandemonium
By KW Mak(© Rolffimages / Dreamstime.com) “YOU either resign or I’ll sue the lot of you for mismanagement!” a resident shouted at Metropolitan Square Condominium’s Joint Management Committee (JMC). It was a threat that led half the committee to resign. Those who resigned felt that the Petaling Jaya City Council, known by its Malay acronym MBPJ, ought […]
For peat’s sake
By KW MakA JUST and fair system is what the people want, and the words “transparency” and “accountability” have been hurled at a government that seemingly does not listen. But cases of injustice and the government seemingly allowing the perpetrators to get away with murder (figuratively speaking, of course) aren’t always as clear cut as they seem. […]
Net TV: Does it click?
By Ooi Ying NeeAN afternoon in a home studio, six t-shirt changes, and six volunteers tinkering with borrowed camera equipment. That’s all it took to produce six seven-minute episodes of The Fairly Current Show (TFCS), a talk show on the internet TV network PopTV that was launched in June 2008. PopTV co-founder Hardesh Singh says PopTV will “give […]
Along the path of apathy
By KW MakWHEN I worked as a reporter not too long ago covering issues affecting communities, one of the attitudes I frequently encountered from the public was apathy: so long as their personal lives were unaffected, people rarely cared about what was around them. Take, for example, middle-income urbanites who turn an unthinking blind eye to the […]
