Singapore Democratic Party (SDP) member Bryan Lim took to Facebook on Sunday (10 January) to highlight a concern raised by a resident at Marsiling-Yew Tee GRC on the wastage of funds in constructing unnecessary infrastructure in the constituency.
The resident, who lives in Woodlands, cited a couple of projects that they feel is a waste of taxpayers’ funds. The first is the construction of a walkway which leads to a wall, as well as adding many stainless steel railings along different paths.
As such, the resident pointed out that such “useless, poorly designed and supervised construction” is such a waste of taxpayers’ monies, and it does not even seem like isolated cases.
If that’s not all, the resident also noted that the People’s Action Party (PAP) “built something for the sake of building (and spending money), and making the place worse off”.
Some of the badly designed and constructed infrastructure include a badminton court that looks like a caged gladiator arena, a barbeque pit that no one uses as well as lack of greenery in the estate despite the PAP promising to add more of it in its 2015 election newsletter.
In response to this, Mr Lim said: “His appropriate description of the issues with some of the infrastructure in the estate – some of them which the residents have never asked for, highlighted the long standing problem of wasted public monies which could have been put to better use on more critical projects.”
In a separate post, Mr Lim also uploaded a video of the said walkway and it shows that the walkway leads to a deadend.
In his Sunday’s post, Mr Lim mentioned that the ruling party always “dangles all these ‘nice looking’ improvements projects” to entice voters, but fail to address other important and serious national issues.
“Election in, election out, the PAP always dangles all these “nice looking” improvements projects to entice the electorate & at the same time, divert their attention away from serious national issues like the influx of foreign PMETs, returning CPF money to the retirees, the spiralling cost of living, exorbitant public housing prices & the need for a minimum wage etc,” he explained.
He went on to note that after the election is over, all these new infrastructure end up being “white elephants” that are not fully utilised while national issues continue to be unresolved because the PAP comes back into power again.
Besides Mr Lim, SDP’s chief Chee Soon Juan also mentioned in a Facebook post in November last year about “dubious upgrading projects” at Bukit Batok.
The politician highlighted three of these projects that are proposed in the PAP’s five-year master plan for Bukit Batok, and urged the Jurong-Clementi Town Council (JRTC) to review such projects.
In another post, he also questioned PAP’s Murali Pillai (MP for Bukit Batok) on the need to replace a fairly new canvas roof at a neighbourhood basketball court in Bukit Batok, adding that it’s “wasteful spending of public funds”.
On top of that, Dr Chee also urged JRTC and Mr Pillai to consult residents before proposing any changes in the constituency.
