‘Smart city status top of the agenda’

BECOMING a smart city with low carbon emissions by 2025 will be the Pasir Gudang City Council’s (MBPG) main agenda this year, says mayor Datuk Asman Shah Abd Rahman.

The city council will also ensure that its service delivery is up to mark through the Pasir Gudang Local Plan 2025.

“We want to give the people in Pasir Gudang the best service and in line with that, we are improving our strategic plan and have come up with the MBPG Revolution Manifesto, which will become the benchmark of our success.

“These targets will make Pasir Gudang a liveable, smart and low-carbon city by 2025,” he said when contacted by StarMetro.

The MBPG Revolution Manifesto includes the Smart Port, Smart Zoning, Smart Environment, Enhancing Caring and Active Neighbourhood initiatives.

“Smart Port and Smart Zoning focus on turning Pasir Gudang into a digital port city while improving the infrastructure, and Smart Environment relates to how we expand environmental protection efforts such as Waste-To-Wealth (WTW), Eco-Norm Education and Eco-Preserve.

“For Enhancing Caring, we look at creating more community space, such as a homeless centre, workers’ enclave and a safe neighbourhood scheme, while Active Neighbourhood provides platforms for the local community to be active through initiatives such as Cahaya Baru Outreach,” he explained.

Safety will be under the MBPG Safe City, which is in line with the state government’s Safe Johor Agenda.

“We will coordinate measures to develop our smart city target holistically and also improve our food security initiative.

“This is also in line with the Greater Johor Baru initiative, which involves ways to develop the local council safety features,” he said.

He added that for MBPG, the focus would be on the optimum usage of land and buildings as well as developing smart infrastructure such as an Integrated Command and Control Centre (CCC).

The council will also look at managing movement of heavy vehicles in the city, besides having traffic wardens to control the flow of traffic, said Asman Shah.

“We will boost our food security initiative through community farming,” he said, adding that MBPG would continue to move forward and improve its service delivery.

“Our main customers are the people, and we have to put ourselves in their shoes to look at how we are performing.

“We need to be quick in our work, be a good example and carry out our duties for the benefit of all ratepayers,” said Asman Shah.

He said that having a council that was “all talk but no action” would push people away from reaching out for assistance.

“We need to show that our services can be relied upon and we can ease any complicated process for the people,” he said, highlighting that the council had introduced a digitalisation service to ease certain processes at the council.

“This includes the e-licence service for business licence applications, e-scape service for landscape maintenance, and e-contract for contract applications,” he said, adding that all council workers were provided with tablets for the purpose.