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Jakarta paves road to slimmer organization
Triwik Kurniasari and Tifa Asrianti , The Jakarta Post , Jakarta | Sat, 11/08/2008 11:49 AM | City
The city administration Thursday submitted a draft of the new bylaw on organizational structure to the City Council following a call from the Home Ministry to finish the draft.
Governor Fauzi Bowo said that to make the new structure, his administration had to wait for the ministerial decision, which was issued on Oct. 22.
"The new structure will cut several posts. For example, five assistants to the city secretary will become four, 11 bureaus become 10, 26 agencies become 20, and 16 technical bodies become 10," Fauzi said during the plenary session.
He said he hoped the bylaw would be approved in December so it could be applied in time for the 2009 draft budget.
The restructuring is in accordance with a 2007 governmental decree on regional structure.
According to the decree, a city with a population of more than 7.5 million people and a city budget of more than Rp 2 trillion (US$202 million) must make do with one city secretary, four assistants, a secretary to the city council, 18 agencies and 12 technical bodies.
The Home Ministry previously urged the city administration to complete and submit the draft bylaw, as the 2009 city budget should be based on the new structure.
Jakarta and four other provincial administrations -- Papua, West Papua, Gorontalo and Riau -- have not submitted new organizational structures to the ministry, said the ministry officer Akhmad Zubaidi on Wednesday.
"We hope Jakarta can be a good example for other provinces in the country. It's about public need, so they should submit the new structure immediately," Zubaidi said.
"The slim organizational structure will save on expenditures and make the administration more professional and effective."
Based on the governmental decree, the capital should have completed the new structure in July 2008, but it failed to do so. The ministry has given Jakarta leeway until the end of the year.
To meet the required structure stipulated by the regulation, the city administration will merge a number of agencies.
The primary education and the secondary and higher Education agencies, for example, will merge to form a single education agency.
Other planned mergers include joining the tourism and the culture and museum agencies to form the Jakarta Culture and Tourism Agency. The agriculture and forestry and the fisheries and maritime agencies will become the Jakarta Food Resilience and Maritime Agency.
The city's office for building management, for instance, will become part of the housing agency, to be renamed the Jakarta Housing and Regional Building Agency.
A new Jakarta Green Area and Cemetery Agency will come out of a merger between the parks and the public cemetery agencies.
The spatial planning agency and the land and mapping office will merge to form the Jakarta Spatial Planning and Utilization Agency.
However, city officials have not yet specified to what extent staff positions will be eliminated.
While several agency heads were eliminated, the city administration on the other hand proposed adding 12 executive posts, consisting of four newly defined deputies and two assistants for each of them.
The four deputies, who report to the governor, will be in charge of population and housing; tourism and culture; spatial planning and environmental affairs; and trade, industry and transportation.
