Parking fees in Kota Kinabalu are some of the lowest in the world. Motorists pay between 20 and 50 sen (6 and 14 cents) to park for 30 minutes or an hour in the city. Of course, depending on how busy the area is, the rate doubles or triples the longer they park. But parking here is still very cheap. Yet Kota Kinabalu City Hall has been unable to collect most of the money. It is saddled with outstanding parking fees and fines to a staggering RM58 million over the last 10 years, according to mayor Abidin Madingkir. An “amnesty” to allow defaulters to pay a fraction of what they owe has failed. And another attempt to make motorists pay upfront in a coupon system has irked them.
Jimmy Wong, a Kota Kinabalu lawmaker of the national opposition Democratic Action Party, has now joined a chorus of unhappy voices to tell city hall to scrap the pay-as-you-park system. A trial-run of it which began in October has certainly not gone down well with motorists who find it irksome to have to decide how long they are going to park, then scratch the date, time and fee on the coupon and display it on their car windscreen. But they are most unhappy with city hall which has hiked parking fees by more than twice as much. Unpopular too is city hall’s move to fine motorists RM500 for refusing to pay parking fees, up from RM300.
Brash and headstrong, Mr Wong has challenged city hall to a fight as he tells it to stop the hikes. “You want to fight the people?” he asks. “They are behind me.”
Like most local authorities, Kota Kinabalu City Hall is cash-strapped although it has income from property development with private investors besides rates on property and fees from licensing and garbage collection. But it has never published its accounts and nobody knows the state of its finances.
The fact that city hall has allowed motorists to run into debts for 10 years speaks poorly of its financial management. And what is even more shocking is that the mayor is willing to lose RM48 million of outstanding debts just hoping to collect RM10 million from motorists who have not paid their parking tickets. Mr Wong says that city hall has managed to collect only 30% of the RM10 million since the two-month grace period for them to pay only RM30 to cancel all their debts was announced by Mr Madingkir in August.
The mayor says city hall has issued slightly more than 608,000 parking tickets, but only about a third of these have been paid.
Those in the know say that city hall earns about RM250,000 a month from parking fees when it took over their collection from contractors in May. There are about 12,000 parking bays in the city.
Sabah Insights 