DAP’s wishlist for pak lah… for penang

ok long time i have not blog on penang so i guess i’ll do it today. spur on by an article in bernama where DAP calls on pak lah to give his special attention to penang.

DAP’s chairman chow kon yeow, listed out a few issues that our new PM ought to pay attention to, which are:

1. The Penang Bridge;
2. Restoration of the free port status;
3. Water management rights;
4. Review of the outer ring road project;
5. Fulfilling the need for more Chinese schools;
6. Promoting a house-owning democracy;
7. Making Penang floods-free
8. Ensuring balanced development;
9. Making Penang safe and reducing crimes; and
10. Enhancing investment and promoting tourism in the State.

hmm… i like issues no. 4 and 7.

no. 4 – regarding the penang outer ring road (PORR) and the butterworth outer ring road (BORR). i had been all along against PORR and written about it in a few other forums/star paper. like here where you’ll see me speaking up under my handle ‘sweety’. i feel that the construction of PORR would not help alleviate traffic jam in the island but instead might worsen it. even my simple undedicated mother is able to say “with more roads built, more traffic would be coming in, thus more traffic jam”. this is one reason. another reason is lots of places have to made way for PORR, notably part of our ‘green lungs’ – the youth park and gurney drive. also many residents houses will be affected. thirdly because there was no transparency in the awarding of contract. the contractor who get the job, metroworks, is a relatively unheard of name with no road construction experience and worst….. with only RM50,000 paid up capital. read about the ‘bosses of PORR’ here.

the 7th issue on making penang flood free, well i had talked about this already when i blog on the rain in penang a few times. see right sidebar under ‘my penang blog’.

the other day we heard that our PM had allocated RM32m for flood relief aid but nothing was mentioned about flood mitigation. DAP’s chow said that pak lah’s help is urgently sought to help to implement flood mitigation projects and hope that the government will allocate a huge sum to help in the projects. well i hope so too, a sum set aside for the floor mitigation projects would be much better than a sum set up for flood relief.

well i guess we could say these issues (the 10 issues bought up by DAP) were DAP’s wishlist. a wishlist for penang. as a penangtite myself, i hope pak lah would give serious consideration to these issues brought up by DAP.