Wednesday, February 08 2012
Butterworth remains the Ugly Duckling
Monday, 28 June 2010 11:31

By Goh Ban Lee.

When a clear vision for growth is missing, places and plans that hold promise turn into disappointments. Such is the case for Butterworth. But now that the town is richly represented in the state assembly, perhaps the aging duckling can yet turn out to be a swan.

SURELY, Butterworth is worth more than what it is getting.

About 25 years ago, I gave a talk to a youth organisation there about the future of the town. The title of my paper was “Butterworth – Will the Ugly Duckling Become a Beautiful Swan?” It was hoped that the growing but dull Butterworth would develop into an attractive town.

Unfortunately, the duckling has been chronically sick.

Butterworth came into existence about 160 years ago when a collection of existing villages in Province Wellesley, since renamed Seberang Perai, was declared a single urban entity. The new town took its name from William J. Butterworth, the Governor of the Straits Settlements from 1843 to 1855.

Butterworth developed quickly into a transportation hub. Besides the ferries to  Penang Island, the bus station near the pier has buses going to most major towns not only in Seberang Perai but also neighbouring states. There are also deep water wharves, a train station and a container terminal.

After independence, as part of the effort to encourage import substitution industries in the 1960s, the Alliance state government under Tan Sri Wong Pow Nee developed Mak Mandin as the first industrial estate in Penang.

In 1953, the Butterworth Town Board was upgraded to a town council with elected councillors. Nine years later, the Butterworth Town Council merged with the Rural District Council to form the District Council North. This also had appointed councillors since local government elections had by then been suspended. (The reason given for appointing councillors was the confrontation with Indonesia.)

In 1974, the Gerakan state government under the leadership of Tun Dr Lim Chong Eu merged all the three district councils in Seberang Perai into a management board, officially known as Lembaga Pengurusan Kerajaan Tempatan Seberang Perai. It was transformed into a municipal council in 1976 and renamed Majlis Perbandaran Seberang Perai (MPSP) following the provisions of the newly minted Local Government Act, 1976.

Besides being the seat of the local council, Butterworth also played host to many government offices and facilities, including the district police headquarters, district hospital and district office. As a result, the town boundaries were enlarged and the population grew from 3,900 in 1911 to about 43,000 in 1957. By 1980, there were 77,000 people living in Butterworth.

The fortunes of Butterworth changed in the 1970s. The Gerakan state government’s focus was largely on developing the Bayan Lepas Free Zone and the Perai Industrial Estate. Where urban development was concerned, attention was on Komtar in George Town and the two new towns, Bayan Baru and Seberang Jaya. With the construction of the Penang Bridge in 1985 and the North-South Highway a few years later, Butterworth’s fate was sealed.

Making matters worse, to the north of Butterworth is Kepala Batas, the hometown of former Prime Minister Tun Abdullah Ahmad Badawi. In their rush to please Abdullah when he was the deputy prime minister (1999–2003) and prime minister (2003–2009), politicians and government officers seemed to have eyes only for Kepala Batas and a nearby new town, Bertam, when deciding on development projects.

But the local council cannot remain without blame for this. Despite being the headquarters for the local council until 2006, not much effort has been put into making Butterworth attractive. The long sandy beaches and the Prai River have not been used to enhance the town. The council has also not taken advantage of the presence of a military air base just north of the town. In fact, even when the base was under the Royal Australian Air Force, senior officers and their families stayed in Tanjung Bungah on the island, and not close to work!

The council was so inefficient that Butterworth was noted as the dirtiest town in the country by Tan Sri Mohd Khir Johari when he was the Minister of Trade and Industry and president of Pacific Area Travel Association (PATA) in the early 1970s.

Butterworth is therefore in a sorry state today. The Pengkalan Sultan Abdul Hamid never regained its stature after the disastrous collapse of the passenger platform in 1988, which injured more than 1,600 persons and cost 32 lives. A fire destroyed the three-storey bus station cum shopping centre near the ferry terminal in 2001; a decade later, the “temporary” open-air bus station is disgracefully still in service. A new bus station has yet to be commissioned.

Furthermore, Butterworth is a town with no heart, administratively or commercially. Almost all government offices and facilities have shifted elsewhere. The district police headquarters and the district office have moved to Bertam, and the district hospital is in Seberang Jaya. Even the seat of the local council, which had been in Butterworth for more than half a century, was relocated in 2006 to Bandar Perda, a new town between Butterworth and Bukit Mertajam.

The old town centre at Bagan is hollowing out, and is now filled with empty and dilapidated shophouses. Butterworth has no shopping centre. There is no watering hole for the young and young at heart to congregate after a hard day’s work. The in place on the mainland is Auto City, which is about 15km away.

Even a plan for the development of Butterworth and the surrounding areas has been left uncompleted. The Butterworth Local Plan 2010 is still in draft form at the end of its stated shelf-life. It is no surprise that the population of Butterworth dropped to 58,000 in 1991. Although the population increased to 69,000 in 2000, it is still lower than it was in 1980.

But there is some hope. Butterworth is home to the proposed RM2bil Penang Sentral, which promises to be the modern transportation hub for the Northern Corridor Economic Region.

Furthermore, the town is well represented in the Penang State Government. All the three state assemblymen of Butterworth are from the DAP, a component of the Pakatan Rakyat state government. While A. Tanasekaran (Bagan Dalam) is a backbencher, Lim Hock Seng (Bagan Jermal) and Phee Boon Poh (Sungei Puyu) are state executive councillors. More importantly, the Member of Parliament for Bagan which covers Butterworth, Lim Guan Eng, is Chief Minister.

But it may be wise to keep a hold on celebrations.

The man behind the Penang Sentral project, Tun Abdullah Badawi, is now no more than the Member of Parliament for Kepala Batas, and does not have the power he once had.

Furthermore, Penang state is ruled by Pakatan Rakyat, the opposition in the federal government, which is in charge of infrastructural funding.

So far, nothing has been heard from the elected representatives about their visions or plans for Butterworth. They have less than three years to do something dramatic to revive the ailing town. Otherwise, what are they going to tell voters in the next general elections?

Goh Ban Lee is a senior research fellow at the Socio-Economic and Environmental Research Institute (SERI).

** Reproduced with permission. This article first appeared in the June 2010 issue of the Penang Economic Monthly. This 11-year old magazine published by the Socio-economic and Environmental Research Institute (SERI) is being overhauled and commercialised. This endeavour is in response to the growing insight among Penangites and Penang lovers that the downward trend in the state's fortunes cannot be succesfully reversed unless they themselves get seriously involved. The goal is to inspire positive action among readers towards attaining a "Penang Renaissance".

For more information, please visit the Penang Economic Monthly site or contact the Socio-economic and Environmental Research Institute (SERI) at 604-2283306.

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