The Star, Friday November 2, 2012

Overcrowding now a problem in Kajang, too

The Kajang Municipal Council (MPKj) plans to study how local authorities in Petaling Jaya and Subang Jaya controlled overcrowding in houses, as the phenomenon is becoming a problem within the municipality.

The problem was raised by MPKj councillor Arutchelvan Subramaniams during the council’s 10th full board meeting on Wednesday.

Arutchelvan said he had been informed by residents that certain properties housed more than 10 occupants, mostly foreign workers.

In addition, some units were also over-occupied by students studying at an international university.

“This is a new problem for us, because there were no such cases before the campus opened in the area,” said MPKj president Datuk Hasan Nawawi Abd Rahman.

Arutchelvan said he had been receiving complaints over the past six months now, and the council had taken the owners of some of these illegally-partitioned houses to court.

“In one case, the owner of a bungalow in Taman Tasik Semenyih had originally applied to convert the house into a meditation centre.

“However, it was instead turned into an illegal hostel with 28 partitions within, each partition with its own electric meter!” said Arutchel-van.

Hasan Nawawi said that since the Petaling Jaya City Council (MBPJ) and Subang Jaya Municipal Council (MPSJ) had dealt with overcrowding problems for far longer, MPKj would study their methods of controlling the problem.

He said the council would also look into bylaws on overcrowding to check whether the existing regulations were adequate for enforcement, or whether the council needed to draft new bylaws to be gazetted by the state authority to combat the problem.

“MPSJ has been facing this problem since the colleges sprung up. Look at the Sunway area or SS15 and its surrounding areas.

“We will be calling a meeting next month so that we can start our study,” said Hasan Nawawi.

He added that the council study would be led by MPKj’s Building Control Department, and it would also involve the Health and local Fire and Rescue departments.

During the full board meeting, Hasan Nawawi also revealed that MPKj had received a four-star rating in the latest Auditor-General’s report for financial management, and was only one of two local authorities in Selangor, the other being MPSJ, to receive that rating.

“The state government had promised a RM20,000 incentive to whichever local authority that achieved that rating, so we are feeling quite good because we have also received the same ratings from the Housing and Local Government Ministry for 2011/2012,” said Hasan Nawawi.