An honorable member of the Coffee Shop Has Just Posted the Following:
MP Zaqy Mohamad (Chua Chu Kang GRC): On the issue of transparency, one of the sticking points from many of the residents or potential buyers of these flats was that the columbarium was seen to be a fine print. So moving forward, from a URA perspective or sales perspective, how does HDB plan to change this practice?
Mr Khaw: In this instance, there was no question of lack of transparency. The site was clearly marked as a temple.
And in fact, for completeness, the HDB put in a footnote to indicate there may be a columbarium because we cannot assume that the temple will build a columbarium. (With such a glib forked tongue, this Malaysia Cow should join Alvin Yeo's law firm).
I am closely associated with three temples which I visit quite regularly, and out of the three, two have columbarium service. So it's not all three or all zero. And so, some do (have columbariums), some don't.
And even for this new temple that will eventually crop up... we do not know whether they want to put up a columbarium service or not. So we cannot make the assumption.
But I think the unhappiness of the residents over the last few weeks was that they thought we were going to allow a commercial columbarium to be built - and this is quite a different creature from an incidental columbarium service.
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