GEORGE TOWN – The Penang Island City Council (MBPP) must ensure the long-awaited Penang Island Local Plan 2035 plan prohibits hillside development and reduces the number of designated commercial zones included in the previous local plan, an expert and a former city councillor said.
Environmentalist and geospatial expert Datin Kam Suan Pheng said the new local plan should not permit any development on hillside areas to be in line with the existing Penang Structure Plan 2030 that prohibits urban development on gazetted highlands.
The structure plan, gazetted in 2019, defines highlands as land located 76m above sea level or steeper than 25 degrees.
Currently, there is no local plan for Penang because the previous draft plan – unveiled in October 2022 – was tossed out by the state government in July last year due to numerous mistakes.
The MBPP was ordered to rework the plan but is reportedly still in the process of appointing a consultant, according to a council spokesman contacted by Scoop.
Kam said the previous draft local plan had designated 457.05ha of land parcels as “zon lereng bukit” (hillside zone) – scattered in various areas on the island including Air Itam, Tg Bungah, Paya Terubong, Balik Pulau, Bayan Lepas and Teluk Kumbar.
Kam said this designation was a clear contravention of the overall structure plan.
”It is imperative that the replacement plan being drafted for the island not to have land parcels designated as ‘zon lereng bukit’, which clearly contravenes the extant structure plan,” she said.
A local plan determines the density of future developments and specifies the types of projects permitted in each area over a period of time. Meanwhile, a structure plan is a blueprint to guide the overall development of a place.
Penang has never had a local plan gazetted since Pakatan Rakyat took over the state government in 2008.
In October 2022, MBPP unveiled the draft Penang Island Local Plan 2030 for public input. However, the draft – designed by a Kuala Lumpur-based consultant – was criticised by civil society groups who pointed out errors which included depictions of buildings situated in the sea, and the absence of an inventory of heritage buildings in George Town.
Why so many commercial zones?
Meanwhile, Lim Mah Hui of Penang Forum, a coalition of local NGOs, expressed concern about the previous draft local plan which designated “too many” areas as commercial zones with plot ratios of 5:1 and even as high as 7:1.
He said this is especially serious given Penang’s huge property overhang.
Plot ratio, also known as floor area ratio (FAR), is applied to commercial and residential buildings. It is expressed as a ratio of the size of the built-up area to the land area of the project.
In George Town’s Unesco Heritage Zone, developments with a 5:1 plot ratio are prohibited.
However, landowners who own plots within the Unesco Heritage site, have used the illegal practice of transfer of development rights (TDR) to build high-rise commercial buildings in other places, even if the new sites are unable to support such high density, said Lim, who was formerly an MBPP city councillor.
Such practice, he said, has resulted in apartment blocks being built in already congested areas on the island.
Lim said that the absence of a gazetted local plan for the island is one of the enabling factors behind the construction of high-rise buildings on sites that are not sustainable for such developments.
“But the other problem is that even if we have a local plan, we may still end up with all these unsustainable high rises unless we can push back and limit the kind of density and plot ratios that they are now practising.
“In some places, the density goes up to 200 plus units per acre,” Lim told Scoop in an interview.
Build public housing near public transportation hubs
Meanwhile, Lim also said the local plan must ensure that public housing projects are built near public transportation hubs to reduce residents’ dependency on cars.
He pointed out that some public housing projects are built in areas without convenient access to public transport.
“Now we can see that many low-cost, affordable cost areas are teeming with cars that are parked haphazardly on the street. It shouldn’t be the case.”
“Affordable housing should be built in areas with good public transport (service) so that people don’t have to use cars,” said Lim.
The new local plan should also emphasise the expansion of Penang’s public bus service, waterway transportation and pedestrian-friendly walkways, said Penang Public Transport Users Association secretary Zulfikar Abdul Aziz.
Zulfikar said the previous plan placed too much emphasis on Penang’s first Mutiara Line LRT project which would run from Bayan Lepas to Komtar in the original plan.
He said that the state government’s fixation on the LRT project as the solution for the traffic congestion problems on the island showed that it “either doesn’t know about public transport or they’re intentionally not really focusing on it”.
The previous plan also did not consider increasing the number of buses to the recommended ratio of 1000 buses per 1 million population.
Rapid Penang currently has 240 buses operating, and the previous draft local plan only proposed up to five additional bus routes for the island.
“Even if the state says: ‘No, the solution is LRT’ the fact remains that LRT still needs a bus (service) for it to be successful (in providing first and last mile service),” he added.
Zulfikar also suggested the new local plan expand the present catamaran water taxi routes to include the Bayan Lepas Free Trade Zone (FTZ) for islanders working there.
More green and recreational spaces
Stakeholders also feel that as Penang’s population grows, the island needs more recreational spaces.
Kam, the geospatial expert, said the new local plan draft should ensure it fulfils the national target of having 2ha of recreational space per 1,000 population.
If the island is projected to have a 1.1 million population by 2030 according to the previous draft local plan, then it needs around 2,000 ha of recreational spaces created.
However, the previous local plan only identified land about half the recommendation or 1068.82ha for recreational spaces, noted Kam.
To meet the national target, it is not enough to create large parks like the Gurney Bay but it is also important to plan a hierarchy of public open spaces, including neighbourhood parks of adequate size that are within easy reach of residents, especially those in high-density housing areas, without adding to the traffic congestion and parking problems to reach them.
Related to all these concerns about the new draft local plan, Kam said the cadastral and land use base maps must be accurate and up to date, as these will be used in the creation of the local plan, which will then be gazetted into law, with legal implications.
“A person who owns a piece of land has a right to know what it can be utilised for. (This is) because the local plan will have to designate its future land use, whether it is commercial or residential and so on, and therefore, (an accurate) base map is very important,” Kam said.
The cadastral map base for the previous draft local plan that was rejected was found to have outdated land lot shapes, sizes and identifiers, due to land transactions in the past. The land use base map was also found to be erred in identifying the long-term use of particular land lots.
“How would you assign a future land use to it (land lot) if it is wrongly identified?” Kam said. – September 3, 2024