Secretary Rosário denies flaws to parliament

Secretary for Transport and Public Works Raimundo do Rosário queried why lawmaker Leong Hong Sai asked about direct designation of land concession yesterday, given existing laws have prohibited this practice for nearly 10 years.

Leong raised several questions about land management and development during yesterday’s oral inquiry session, and said that government “was unclear about the procedure used by the government when directly designating land concession.”

Before answering the lawmaker’s question, Rosário spent a few minutes defending himself. He emphasized that the current land law had been in place for nearly 10 years and does not permit direct designation of land concession.

“I don’t understand why the issue of direct designation is still being raised,” Rosário said.

“Tomorrow’s newspaper headlines are likely to read, ‘Lawmaker Leong questions government’s messy land designation.’ Is this the result you are seeking?”

Rosário recalled that he had been asked similar questions at a previous parliamentary inquiry session in April, during which he had emphasized that direct designation of land concession is not lawful.

He felt that the parliament had not been fair to him in respect of government construction projects running behind schedule and over budget. He noted that when the government rectified these problems, similar questions continued to be raised.

On land resource management, the senior official emphasized that in his nearly nine years in office as the secretary, he had treated matters of land management and development with the utmost seriousness among about a dozen topics under his remit.

His branch of government is concerned with areas ranging from urban and public construction to matters of weather, transport and environmental protection.

“Before, we called our land ‘government land,’ but now it is referred to as ‘state-owned land,’” Rosário said. “I don’t believe any secretary treats matters relating to state-owned land trivially.” He added that if he had done so, he would have lost his job.

State-owned land is also his defense against calls by lawmakers and the public to convert certain unused land for public leisure facilities. Lawmaker Ron Lam mentioned the Singaporean practice of declaring state-ownership of land via signage, while offering it up for public leisure use, and encouraged the government to follow suit.

While recognizing the merits of this idea, Rosário said that state-owned land must be treated more seriously than other matters.

Some lawmakers held the view that land may be better used to store building products or for waste management, while others were of the view that leaving undeveloped land unattended would cause safety and security concerns.

However, Rosário was concerned that tenants may ultimately come to expect to be able to use the land for such purposes and that the government would be faced with additional questions about where existing land users could relocate their industrial resources when asked to vacate in the future.

Similarly, Rosário was concerned that the public would have similar concerns once the government decided to repurpose or develop land that had been temporarily used for leisure.

Rosário also asked why the business sector had set their sights on state-owned land to ease operational burdens. Instead, he suggested that ordinary business protocols be followed, such as the leasing of dedicated storage spaces.

By way of analogy, the official compared land reserves to an emergency savings account that should only be used when necessary.

Moving on to discuss matters of political transparency, Rosário said that information is publicly available on the websites of the relevant bureaus or departments. He pledged that any information identified as not currently available would be published on the relevant websites as soon as practicable.

In response to Leong’s call for systematic improvement to avoid future breaches, Rosário expressed his openness to improvement, noting that appropriate procedures and practices are safeguarded in the Land Law and Urban Planning Law. In addition, as Urban Planning Committee plenaries are publicly accessible and Planning Conditions Graphs are available for public opinion and input 10 days prior to each plenary, the secretary asserted that the system was as transparent as possible.

Leong also asked about repayment of “land debts,” referring to land that the government promised developers in exchange for land originally owned by them or that was designated land. Rosário maintained that the issue is extremely complicated, so more time to resolve the debt would be needed.