Cape of Flowers

Welcome to the Flower Cape !

By now everybody will have seen the huge mural painted on the wall across from the Tanjong Bunga Hotel. It was not just done because someone thought the wall was ugly and a Welcome would be nice. It is a message with flowers (bunga) to remind the State government that this is where Tanjong Bunga starts, not at Mar Vista !

Together with our State Assembly man, YB Teh, TBRA thought it had to remind the government and the MPPP that the official boundaries of Tanjong Bunga town start from Jalan Gajah (near the mural) and finish at the Mar Vista Resort whose official address is 1 Jalan Batu Ferringhi. Why would they not know? Why would they want to forget? Here is the story in brief.

When deciding on zoning the State, the previous government, by right, considered Tanjong Bunga to be a tourist zone and a residential area and placed it in the Secondary Development Corridor. So the wording of the 2005 Structure Plan put Tanjong Bunga into a green zone. When the Structure Plan was printed, the wording was still there but the diagrams illustrating the zones had been changed from green to orange. That meant Primary Development Corridor. That meant that by one stroke of a colouring pencil, the permissible density of our town had changed, allowing for all kinds of high rises and commercial buildings. Believe it or not, by the colouring, Tanjong Bunga starts at Mar Vista. And since Mar Vista is in Batu Ferringhi, Tanjong Bunga has been wiped off the map. It ceased to exist.

TBRA has protested against this for years, first nicely, then by way of lawyers’ letters and via top level meetings. Nothing doing. The State government, the MPPP, all refused to listen. So this flower mural was yet one other attempt to get our point across. In the last meeting with the head of Planning, TBRA asked if any of the staff remembered how the colouring happened. After some hesitation, they said that it was the former CM, Koh Tsu Koon himself, who personally instructed the staff to change the colour of Tanjong Bunga. Some twenty people in the room heard this, noted this and wrote it into the Minutes of that meeting.

The Minutes were sent out to all concerned starting with the very top, i.e. the current CM, and adding that since this was an illegal act, there should be a moratorium on all further plans handed in for approval. Not until the Structure Plan diagram is corrected, should any permit be given to start constructing one more condo. The answer to date? Silence. Silence is golden, they say, but there are times when silence pays rich dividends.

Welcome to Tanjong Bunga !