Deputy Prime Minister Gan Kim Yong addressed Punggol residents’ concerns on April 28, promising tailored solutions for the estate’s unique environment.
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00:00I've been spending the last few days walking the ground, meeting a lot of people and also sometimes I spend quite a lot of time sitting down, having a meal with them or have a coffee with them and even if I'm not drinking or eating anything, I just have a chat with the residents in Pongo to just get to know them, what their concerns are, what their interests are, what their aspirations are and what the problems could be and see how we can make Pongo.
00:30I can go to a better place going forward if they support me and I think the feeling is very good because in the sense that they are quite open to me and in fact it's not all positive and they don't say, oh good job, please carry on and some of them are quite honest, quite open and say that there are problems here.
00:50So I know because wherever I go, wherever I came from, they will always have issues because the world is not perfect. I think there were a lot of BTO units, particularly the first few batches of a BTO, the workmanship was not up to the mark because I think the main contractor went into receivership and then there was a changeover in construction and so on and the project was delayed and the workmanship was not quite up to the mark.
01:16So residents were concerned that, you know, what's going to happen if the quality is not as good as particularly the next door batch was very good because there were later batches.
01:26So I assure them that we will take a look at it because we do want to make sure that our residents get what they deserve.
01:33And it's also not just about the hardware because some of them also explained to me that there were monkeys coming over and invading the estate.
01:43I think we have monkeys maybe in Pongo, in Chow Chukang, we have a chicken and birds too. So there were different issues. Some of these were the part of the nature is not so easy to deal with.
01:59But I promise them I will sit down with the relevant agency to see how we can reduce the population of monkeys to make sure that at least our residents in North Shore will feel safe.
02:11It's not just North Shore but across Pongo. So I think we do want to take these issues seriously and we welcome residents to continue to feedback to us.
02:21Is it positive or negative? Tell us because we do want to know. You know my style in handling a crisis and so on. We want to be transparent and open. So be frank with us and we want to address the issue.