Batu Town Spatial Policy

 When leaders choose to make themselves bidders at the auction of their popularity, talent, in nation building, they will not serve the people. They will be sycophants, not legislators, instruments, let alone adding to the aspirations of the people - Edmund Burke

Batu - Last month, (Thursday/29/08/2019, the Government and DPRD Batu have ratified the Regional Regulation on the 2019-2039 Regional Spatial Planning (RTRW) for the City of Batu. This regional regulation is a very important and strategic document because the document becomes a reference for every movement. and steps, whether taken by the government, business actors or the people of Batu City. However, in evaluation and revision, many people do not know the development process as well as the substance of the policy.

Why was the previous Perda on RTRW amended to regulate its contents to tighten the environment and agriculture? One of Bappeda Batu's arguments is that Batu City's RTRW Product was prepared in 2011, so that adjustments are needed through the process of Evaluation and Revision of Batu City's RTRW for a certain period of time (5 years). Therefore, the Batu City Government stated that the reason for revisiting the three-year delay should have been revised in 2016.

There are a number of other arguments that support that the RTRW perda needs to be revised. First, the RTRW expert team has said that one of the visions of developing Batu City is international tourism which should have synergy between artificial tourism, agriculture, trade and other sectors in every City Area (BWK 3). Second, the existence of the Batu RTRW has not been able to optimally accommodate the needs and tourism development programs so that it is necessary to complete the construction of large-scale facilities, such as cable cars, toll roads, geothermal energy and so on. So it needs to be evaluated and corrected through revisions to laws and regulations.

However, if we look at the substance of the latest spatial regulation, it is far from the local values ​​of the Batu community, which are based on nature and agriculture. Among them: (1) There is an artificial tourism projection in Tulungrejo Village, Bumiaji District, thereby eliminating special areas for agriculture and environmental conservation. (2) There is a Geothermal project (Geothermal Electricity Project) in Songgoriti which will absorb springs in the surrounding area. (3) The existence of a cable car project which is suspected to surround the tours made by the Jatim Park Group (4) The existence of the Singosari - Giripurno toll road which has the potential to increase congestion in Batu because of its easy accessibility to Batu. So that it can be said that the Regional Regulation actually marginalizes the Batu community and places more importance on artificial tourism, housing, and other industries which certainly benefit the oligarchs and their groups. If we look at it, of course there are oligarchic interests who want to get more profits so that they intervene in the development agenda of Batu City. This is the author's assumption that became the basis for the Batu City Government in revising the previous regional regulation (RTRW Regional Regulation No. 7 of 2011). On the other hand, the majority of Batu people also do not know whether the development plan is considered beneficial to the community or not? This is in line with Acemoglu and Robinson (2017: xxi-xxii) who argue that the tendency of elite power is to prioritize their own groups while sacrificing the people and inheriting extreme poverty.

Why did this happen? In policy theory, policy formulation plays a vital role in the context of democratization. This means that decision making requires a popular control mechanism. In other words, democracy is a process of popular control over policy making and decision making based on equal political rights (Haryanto, 2017: 25). However, in the preparation of this RTRW regional regulation, community involvement was completely ignored. There is no good involvement in the evaluation and reformulation of policies such as public examinations so that there is minimal public expectation in future development. This is contrary to the Spatial Planning Law no. 26 of 2007 in article 65 that the role of the community in spatial planning as referred to in paragraph (1) is carried out, among others, through: a. participation in the preparation of spatial plans. b. Utilization in spatial c. Participation in spatial control. The implication is that this is used by formulation actors and oligarchs to achieve capital accumulation. In conclusion, the ongoing policy formulation is only an arena where academics, bureaucratic elites, politicians synergize with oligarchs to achieve the interests of wealth accumulation by extracting as much natural wealth as possible in Batu City.