Samy to meet Sri Petaling reps « KL-Putrajaya Highway, Government Project Gone Bad

Samy to meet Sri Petaling reps

From the desk of The Star

Wednesday October 5, 2005

Samy to meet Sri Petaling reps

KUALA LUMPUR: The RM1.2bil Kuala Lumpur-Putrajaya Highway project will go on but Datuk Seri S. Samy Vellu will meet repesentatives of the Sri Petaling residents to find a way to resolve their problems.

The Works Minister however said that because the highway was on Government land, compensation was out of the question for the residents who complained that the walls of their houses cracked due to the construction works.

“We are not occupying the land. If we were to pay compensation, we would be setting a bad precedent,” he told newsmen after meeting Finland’s foreign trade and development minister Mari Kiviniemi at his office here yesterday.

Samy Vellu said the ministry had written to the housing developer Seri Petaling Development in 1996 of its intention to acquire the land to build the Kuala Lumpur-Putrajaya-KLIA Highway. (The Putrajaya-KLIA phase was later scrapped.)

“Due to the economic crisis then, the construction of the highway was delayed but the developers went ahead with the houses,” he said.

Samy Vellu said the Government had so far spent RM400mil on the highway which was expected to lighten traffic flow along the KL-Seremban Highway.

He said noise barriers would be built along the boundary of the highway and the residential area to shut out the din from traffic.

Samy Vellu, SPRA

This entry was posted on Wednesday, October 5th, 2005, 8:45 pm and is filed under News & Developments, Press Coverage. You can follow any responses to this entry through RSS 2.0. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

Highway Key Facts

26KM stretches from Kampung Pandan to Putrajaya
consession signed on 22 Oct 1997
adequate land was available then
resident wrote letter to LLM to advice them to ensure adequate buffer zone since there is land (1997)
project was shelved due to economic crisis
DBKL approved housing project when they should have reserved the land for highway
houses built and sold to unsuspecting buyers
land was 'lost' in the process due to authorities blunder
project is bulldozed through despite protest for safety
project is in breach of their own guidelines

Isn't it ironic?

LLM, DBKL, DOE say they are not aware about the sheer proximity of the highway to the homes!

A resident has written to the authorities way back in 1997 to realign the Right Of Way of the highway to utilize the undeveloped Zone N. [click here to see the letter and how it fell on deaf ears of the authorities]

The developer of Zone N (Petaling Garden Berhad) managed to obtain approval to build houses along a path of designated federal highway. How can that be?

KL-Putrajaya Highway, Government Project Gone Bad