Rewards likely to encourage residents to keep surroundings clean

Ong Dai Lin, TODAY Channel NewsAsia 28 Sep 09;

SINGAPORE: Should residents be rewarded if they keep the estate clean and their Town Council does well in the new bi-annual management report?

Senior Minister of State (National Development) Grace Fu said yesterday the councils could consider such financial incentives. But she stressed: "I think residents should recognise that if they play their part to keep the town clean and easy to maintain ... it will result in more sustainable conservancy charges going forward."

MPs that Today spoke to did not think that incentives and rebates were the most effective ways to motivate residents.

Pasir Ris-Punggol Town Council vice-chairman Teo Ser Luck said any incentive would be one-off and "if you're motivated by money, what happens when the money is taken away". He said "it's more important to recognise residents who have done their part" and suggested certificates could be given out.

Jurong Town Council chairman Halimah Yacob said it would be difficult to decide on a financial incentive and the residents to deserve it. "How much do we need to give residents to get them to cooperate?" she wondered. "How do we decide who has contributed to keeping the place clean?"

Mdm Halimah suggested awards can be given to residents if they need encouragement.

Ms Fu also said Town Councils have reflected concerns about arrears management, one of the indicators used in the management report.

As the councils have different starting points and local circumstances, Ms Fu reiterated that the report is a discussion platform that serves as "a basis for them to improve their performance and how they should manage their town better".

"The idea is not to nit-pick," she said.

Town councils: Measure what matters to residents
Spot checks, arrears collection not best way to measure performance
Chua Mui Hoong, Straits Times 28 Sep 09;

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.