Public service officers, teams awarded for helping solve municipal issues
Mr Kelvin Cher (left) and Mr Mohd Khairuddin Mohd Adnan (right) with their Municipal Services Award. Photo: Wee Teck Hian
SINGAPORE — It started with feedback from a member of the public about the general cleanliness of an area in Bukit Timah in October last year.
When a PUB employee went down for an inspection, he found that besides cleanliness, there were issues with drain structures, uneven road kerbs and pavements that needed to repaired after the removal of trees — a plethora of issues that would require the help of several other government agencies such as the Land Transport Authority, the Singapore Land Authority, the National Parks Board and the National Environment Agency.
Fresh from the training he had received on the then-newly set up Municipal Services Office (MSO), Mr Kelvin Cher Kok How, a management support officer with PUB, decided to put theory into action.
With no point of contact to start with, Mr Cher began with what he described as a “wild goose chase”, emailing the government agencies at “generic emails”. Once he was directed to the appropriate contacts, however, things went smoothly. He said: “It makes me quite humbled to know that the other agencies want to work together to solve citizens’ problems.”
Mr Cher is among the public servants recognised at the MSO’s Municipal Services Awards today (Sept 29), which is given out to public service officers and teams who went out of their way to work with other agencies to solve municipal problems. Ten individuals and six teams were given awards.
The case handled by Mr Cher was resolved within one-and-a-half months. “I think it really represents the ‘whole-government effort’,” he said.
Among the team winners was one comprising officers from the Housing and Development Board, Ministry of Social and Family Development, Agency of Integrated Care, NEA, Singapore Civil Defence Force, the police and the MSO, which came up with a more systematic process to handle hoarding cases in a coordinated way, as such cases tend to be complex and multi-faceted.
The MSO was set up last year to improve the delivery of municipal services, especially in areas where multiple agencies need to be involved. Since then, it has launched the OneService mobile app to collect feedback from the public, and it has received 15,000 cases through the app between January and August. The agency could not provide figures on how many cases have been resolved.
In her speech at the awards ceremony today, Ms Grace Fu, Minister in Prime Minister’s Office, who oversees the MSO, said the agency has also facilitated 24 requests for local infrastructure between last October and August this year.
She commended the award winners for going beyond their call of duty. “If they had only looked at their own areas and worked within boundaries, many of these issues would not have been resolved so quickly,” she said.
