September 28, 2009
By Chua Mui Hoong from Straits Times
I LIVE in a five-room Housing Board flat. Each month, I pay $63 in
service and conservancy charges and $75 for parking.
So for $138 a month, I get: A space in an open surface carpark at the
foot of my block that gets bird poo every now and then – or a spot in
the covered multi-storey carpark a few blocks away. The common
corridor floor is washed once a month, and the bin chute is fogged
several times a year. My estate is pretty clean.
But like thousands of HDB residents, I often wonder how my service and
conservancy charge (S&CC) payments are being spent, how they could be
kept low, and what the town council does to make sure it gets enough
bang for my bucks.
The Town Council Management Report, which will debut next year, will,
unfortunately, not make me any the wiser. Details of this report were
announced last Wednesday, after calls last year for closer scrutiny of
town councils. Town councils drew flak last year after news broke that
some had invested long-term sinking funds in instruments that turned
toxic.
That brouhaha turned out to be a storm in a teacup. As the panel which
came up with the framework for the town council management report
noted, investing is not the town councils' core activity. So it saw no
need to use investment returns as an indicator of good management.
This is sensible. But what, then, should be included? The panel
decided on four categories: cleanliness, estate maintenance, lift
maintenance and arrears in S&CC.
The problem is that some of these indicators depend too much on
factors extraneous to town council management, and are not useful to
residents.
Take the indicator tracking the percentage of arrears in S&CC
payments: An estate with a larger proportion of older, low-income
residents is likely to have a higher percentage of arrears.
A high percentage of arrears – and hence a poor rating in this
category – may correlate more to the socio-economic profile of
residents in the estate than to any management defect. In fact, a
council that wants to look good on this rating may decide to be
aggressive in recovering arrears from residents in financial hardship
– certainly not a desirable outcome.
It is a strange argument that arrears recovery is an indicator of good
financial management. Given that arrears form 3per cent or $15million
of the estimated $500million collected in S&CC each year, the impact
of recovering a larger fraction of arrears on the overall financial
health of a council will be negligible. At the East Coast Town
Council, provision for bad and doubtful debt is $100,000 – a mere
0.55per cent of the $18million spent in 2007/08.
HDB residents like me would rather a town council go easy on that Ah
Pek who is $500 in arrears and struggling to survive on $600 a month
as a cleaner, and focus its resources on looking at how it can
maximise the use of the money it already has at its disposal.
We want to know how councils can become more efficient in estate
management. Sure, we want our estates to be clean, but we also want
S&CC kept down, as a dialogue in July conducted by the National
Development Ministry discovered. Residents want to know how efficient
town councils are with their money, and how they can do more with
less.
Meaningful indicators would be: how is the town council managing the
pool of funds at its disposal? What is the town council's equivalent
of the 'expense ratio' – how much is it paying in fees to managing
agents?
The lion's share of town council expenditure goes to two items:
cleaning, and water and electricity bills. Residents would want to
know what town councils do to keep maintenance costs low.
When building new structures, do town councils consciously go for
options that will have low maintenance costs, or do they go for
structures that are cheap to build, but which will cost more to
maintain down the road?
I, for one, am heartened to learn that my Bishan-Toa Payoh Town
Council is replacing 4,000 outdoor lights with energy-saving bulbs,
cutting the energy bill by 55per cent.
It would also be useful to know how one council does vis a vis others.
What is the cost per unit of cleaning services paid by each council?
Is there a way to raise productivity?
Comparisons would certainly make town councillors and MPs nervous. But
it would have the merit of helping councils share best practices, and
of focusing councillors' minds on what matters most to residents.
The other surprising thing about the framework is the premium it
places on spot checks on cleanliness.
Cleanliness depends as much on residents' habits as on the
effectiveness of a town council. Spot checks are not an ideal way to
gauge how clean an estate is.
Take my estate, which is usually clean. Say that on the one day the
inspector visits, with checklist in hand, four residents put out bulky
items in the corridor pending removal, and another four decline to
clean up their dog poo. As a result, the entire town council will get
an undeservedly low cleanliness rating.
When it comes to cleanliness, a spot check is less meaningful than
tracking performance over time. After all, this was the rationale for
moving away from the 'single big exam' mode of testing in schools to
continuous assessment.
It is more productive for cleanliness ratings to include residents'
views, since they are the ones who live in the estate and know best
how clean the area is.
The other two sets of indicators cover estate maintenance, to measure
defects like leaking pipes; and lifts, tracking lift breakdown and
rescue services. These are simple and easy to quantify.
As Senior Minister of State for National Development Grace Fu notes,
the report marks only the start of a longer process of managing the
performance of town councils.
It is a modest start. The method can be refined in years to come.
But in choosing criteria like arrears management, and opting for an
easy but potentially inaccurate spot-check assessment of cleanliness,
there is a risk that a lot of resources will end up being used to
track the performance of town councils in ways not meaningful to HDB
residents. – ST
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