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HONG KONG PROVISIONAL URBAN COUNCIL
'RESOLVED that if this Council runs into financial deficit, the Council should exert efforts in requesting the Government to make up for the insufficient allocation of funds for the years 1997/1998 to 1999/2000 in order to ensure that the quality of municipal services will not be affected.'
He said (in Cantonese):-Mr. Chairman, many people are under the wrong impression that the rates collected by Government from them is wholly transferred to the two Municipal Councils to finance the provision of municipal services. Take the Urban Council for instance, in fact in the triennium of 1997–2000, only 2.6% of the rates is given to the Council for the provision of municipal services.
Because of this, the Council will be faced with financial difficulties in the next three years in that there will be a deficit. This difficult financial situation is not due to poor financial management of the Council nor the Five-year Plan drawn up by its numerous select committees after public consultation is too large in scale as Members are eager to claim credit for it. It is because the Government has not, in response to public needs, allocated sufficient funds to the Council to enable us to provide the most effective services in the light of the changes in population, environment etc.
Politically, the Chief Executive announced that he was considering a review on district administrative structure, and immediately afterwards, the Secretary for Broadcasting, Culture and Sport echoed that the cultural policies governing the allocation of resources among the two Municipal Councils, the Arts Development Council and the Government itself had to be reviewed. It seems that in not providing the Urban Council with sufficient funding, the Government is simply acting in line with the concept of streamlining the structure. This inevitably gives rise to the wrong association that there is a specific purpose behind the Government's review of district administration, that there is a pre-determined stance and that under the Chief Executive's conservative approach to the development of democracy, the Government is systematically and gradually taking action against district organizations by first cutting back on their expenditure and then on their power.
The Democratic Party is worried that the purpose of the Government's review of the district administrative structure is but centralization of powers, and that the administrative power of some district organizations would further be slashed while public involvement would be curbed through reduction in the number of elected seats, resulting in retrogression in the development of democracy. If analyzed in this political context, not providing the Urban Council with sufficient funding is undoubtedly something that the Government is bent on doing. The purpose is to cut down on resources first before curtailing its authority, thereby reducing considerably its ability to bargain with the central government over the constitutional review.