Urban Renewal Council is an evolutionary ‘step backward,’ says ANM

Jason Chao (left) and Scott Chiang (right)

The New Macau Association (ANM) has urged the government to extend participation in the newly-established Urban Renewal Council (CRU) to community leaders and academics, adding that the CRU has an over-representation of commercial interests at the present time.
Representatives from the association, including president Scott Chiang and vice-president Jason Chao, held a media briefing yesterday afternoon shortly before presenting a petition at the rear entrance to the government’s headquarters.
Pointing to the experience of “nearby regions,” Chiang told the reporters that, “urban renewal can be a deep conflict between [the] interests of the community and that of developers […] a balance of voices from communities, professionals and commercial entities is crucial.”
They fear that an over-representation of commercial interests in the 27-member council could transform the CRU into a champion of developers’ causes, at the expense of contributing to the body’s stated goal of “improving human lives.”
“When we look at the regulation, we see that there are 27 members in the council and 21 of them ought to be from the public, but it [the regulation] doesn’t specify that kind of composition,” said Chiang.
“Now we have a very unbalanced composition of members with [an] overrepresentation from the commercial sector,” he added.
To restore balance to the commercially-dominated council, ANM proposes that Chief Executive Chui Sai On expands the size of the council to accommodate the voices of community leaders and academia.
“If the government is embarrassed to ask [an existing] council member to leave [to make space for a restructuring], then they can simply expand the number of people in the council” and thereby embody greater representation, said Chiang.
The association also condemned the withdrawal of the new council’s requirement for public disclosure, highlighting the omission in recent legislation of a clause found in an earlier statute which stated that “meetings are public in the discussion on the preparation, execution, review and amendment of urban development plans [except where confidentiality is required by law].”
“Contrary to this trend,” the ANM statement read, the new regulations have established the CRU “without such a requirement to make any part of its meetings public.”
“The popular belief that such a technical panel will not interest the general public is not true,” Chiang told reporters. “People get more and more familiar with how things ought to work in that area and the government officials learn more about how to communicate with the public regarding their policies. So it is of mutual benefit.”
The ANM president concluded by stating, “Evolution has taken an unlikely step backward when a council body founded in 2016 is worse than that from 2014.” Daniel Beitler