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and organization of the Council, its Select Committee structure and activities, as well as a biography of each member. This Handbook was distributed to all registered Urban Council voters, with a supply also to schools and Universities, commercial institutions, the Press, City District Offices, Government Departments and, overseas, to members of the H.K. Parliamentary Group and the H.K. Association in London. By the end of the year, we finally managed to produce an Urban Council emblem and badge.
It has been a complaint for some years that our present Council Chamber is inadequate for its purpose; restricted, over-crowded and uncomfortable for both Councillors and the public. I am glad to say that a draft layout plan for a new Council Chamber, with a larger public gallery and adequate committee rooms, offices and other services, has been prepared by the Accommodation Sub-committee and approved by the Council. It now requires that the Colonial Secretariat act with something greater than its usual despatch, and we can have a Chamber adequate to the Council needs by 1975.
In completing this brief review of Administration Select Committee activities, I must comment on current items under planning. These include a bi-lingual Council News-sheet for distribution monthly to Urban Services staff, thus providing improved communication between the Council and its executive arm. It is also our intention to improve our information services to the press, particularly the Chinese Press; and to produce, by mid-year, an Urban Council Report at nominal cost to the public.
We are also investigating the setting up of an Urban Council Central Office—somewhat similar to the UMELCO model—in Hong Kong and Kowloon to serve as further points of contact between the Council and the people. I think we might safely say that the Administration Select Committee is doing its best to build bridges across the existing "communication gaps", and I believe that persistence in this policy will produce favourable results in time.
U.C. Organization and Planning
But if we have been preoccupied mainly with areas of communication and public relations in these past few months, the immediate priority before the Council is the question of planning and organization. Good public relations stem from action and achievement, rather than from statements of aim and promises. And the truth of the matter is that, as a Council, we are not yet "delivering the goods". In the past,
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we could rightly claim that this was for reasons beyond our control. Today, however, circumstances have changed and it is within our power to take the initiative, to restructure our organization to meet our needs, and to enter into a positive and ambitious programme of Council Works development.
The paucity of past achievements is amply illustrated by the analysis of Urban Council works projects prepared recently for the Administration Select Committee. This shows unacceptably slow progress in scores of amenity projects—swimming pools, playgrounds, parks, beach facilities, playing fields—and in dozens of market and hawker bazaar developments, many of which have languished in the Public Works Programme for ten years or more. I do not say this in a spirit of criticism of Public Works Department. There have been, and there continue to be, other important building priorities; but the conditions which have created a mounting backlog over the years of 300 works projects are no longer acceptable to a Council exercising financial autonomy.
The creation of a Council Works Section, and the use of Private Architects to expedite our work programme, was anticipated in the Council's "Memorandum of Administrative Arrangements" of June 1973. It is clear from this document that the Council is the authority for determining the priorities of its capital works, their means of construction, and their financing, either from current account or from loans. Despite apparent reservations in some quarters, I suggest that our financial autonomy is real, but that it only has meaning if we begin to assert our authority, to use and exploit our own "seat of power".
I have said that public relations is born of achievement rather than promises, and that the Council has failed to win public support in the past due to its inability to manage its own affairs and to decide its own priorities. In our new circumstances, how can we correct the situation and present a meaningful Council programme to the public?
I suggest that this can be done by completing a long-term plan for the provision of swimming pool complexes in every urban district of 250,000 population, commencing with Kennedy Town this year and the Hung Hom and Aberdeen Swimming Pool Complexes in 1976. This implies that firm commitments should be made for the provision of swimming pool complexes at Hammer Hill, Kowloon Park and Chai Wan and, also, in other areas of the Colony such as Kowloon Bay, Lei Yue Mun and Lai Chi Kok.