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HONG KONG URBAN COUNCIL
In conclusion, Mr. Chairman, people always try to protect nature by two means. The first one is through their speech or words, and the second one is through actions. I hope we will not just hold on to our speech or words but will go further to fulfill our promises. Mr. Chairman, this is my remarks in response to the motion.
MS. CHRISTINA TING YUK-CHEE (in Cantonese): Mr. Chairman, to begin with, I would like to take this opportunity to congratulate Mr. TUNG Chee-hwa who has been elected the first Chief Executive of the Hong Kong Special Administrative Region. It is my belief that Mr. Tung will lead Hong Kong into an even more glorious era during which Hong Kong will continue to maintain a stable and prosperous environment where people can live and work in peace and contentment.
In line with the objective of ‘Enriching City Life' as before, the Urban Council provided a broad spectrum of municipal facilities to the public last year. For example, the Siu Sai Wan Sports Ground I proposed at the annual conventional debate seven years ago, was finally completed and open to the public. Besides, the completion of the heated pools at Jordan Valley and Hammer Hill Road which found great popularity among the public, as well as the UC Complexes in Smithfield Road, Hung Hom, and Happy Valley, all truly reflect that our goal of “Enriching City Life' has been achieved. However, good times would not go on forever. It is probable that the Council will face a financial crisis in the next three years because the Government intends to reduce the allocation of fund to the Council by $3.8 billion. If this is true, it will definitely affect the services we provide to the public. There might be a possibility of reduction in the provision of municipal facilities which has a great impact on people's livelihood. I sincerely urge the Government to think thrice before she acts and hope that she will change her mind and increase the funding to the Council.
A lot of people might criticize the Council for not managing its finance properly, and for failing to effectively utilize the resources or additional fund allocated to it, such as rates revenue. I am not defending the Council blindly. Of course, there is much room for improvement. However, the Council has actually been adopting measures to allocate resources in a cost-effective way. For example, the Urban Services Department had contracted out the services of manual street cleansing and leisure facilities cleansing to private contractors. The contracting out of these two types of services has helped the Council to save $28 million and $62 million respectively. I hope that the Department would continue to conduct comprehensive value-for-money and management studies so as to fully utilize every penny of the tax-payers.
However, I believe all colleagues would agree with me that the expenditure on hawker control is too extravagant and totally departs from the principle of cost-effectiveness. In the annual debate each year, the problem of illegal hawkers is a hot subject for debate. I wonder why we can tolerate this problem
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