HCMC People’s Council meeting to ponder problems

Residents said they were living in an environment with “all kinds of pollution: water, air and noise” but environment officials don’t seem to care.

They emphasized that more than eight million people around the city are using water pumped from the Saigon River, which is polluted with industrial waste.

Residents want the next session of the People’s Council to come up with a decree on environment.

The People’s Council is meeting to review HCMC’s economic and social progress in 2008 and set out plans for 2009.

Meanwhile, many district locals said the city has yet to develop effective resettlement policies.

“Will the new places be better than the old ones? Have displaced people received the compensation they deserve?” Phan Van Bay of Tan Phu District asked the legislature.

The city’s citizens urged that the use of temporary housing, which has made many headlines in domestic newspapers, must end by the close of this year as the city administration promised at many earlier meetings.

People who gave up their land for the Thu Thiem new urban project, which began in 2006 in District 2, still have not received the new houses promised to them, Bay said.

He said city authorities must make it clear “who is responsible for this.”

Those in outlying districts said the land compensation payments were too low. Residents also said city authorities should strictly and publicly penalize contractors who were late building resettlement houses.

People in District 8, where many freight yards and warehouses have been found recently to be left vacant or used for other purposes, said they wanted the government to exercise better control of the use and management of the city’s storage facilities.

Almost all the city residents have complained about “complicated and troubling procedures” to register for land and house titles, saying that the city officials should be “flexible” in processing these documents.

Reported by Minh Nam