Who’s in the room on 1 September?
1 September at HortPark — and the 25 August deadline before it
HDB is holding a dialogue on 1 September, "Building a Shared Future at Sunset Way & Gillman Barracks", at HortPark. Invitations went out by email this week. Some residents received one. Many did not — including people who have spent the past seven weeks reading the EIA, writing in, and turning up to everything. According to the email, registration closes this Tuesday, 25 August.
First, the part that deserves saying plainly: this is the further engagement the Government committed to on the record on 4 August, and it is happening within the month. That is a promise kept, and we said we would be there when it came.
Now the part worth raising while there is still a week to adjust it.
ONE SESSION, TWO SITES
We understand Sunset Way and Gillman Barracks share the same two-hour slot. July's Sunset Way session at BTCC ran roughly three hours for one site alone, with 131 residents, and still ended with hands in the air. Two sites in two hours gives each community about an hour — for plans that have drawn nearly 3,600 written submissions between them.
AROUND 200 SEATS
We understand the venue holds about 200 people. HDB had received 2,712 responses on Sunset Way and 860 on Gillman by 28 July. Two hundred seats across two neighbourhoods is a narrow door, and it makes the next question the important one.
WHO WAS INVITED, AND HOW WERE THEY CHOSEN?
This is the one we would most like answered before 1 September. Right now nobody outside HDB knows the rule. Residents who submitted detailed feedback have not been invited; others have. If invitations are going out in batches, say so and the worry disappears. If it is a sample, say how it was drawn. If it is residents within a certain radius, say the radius.
This is not an accusation. A room of 200 requires some selection rule, and there may well be a sensible one. We simply cannot see it — and a session about transparency should not open opaquely. Publishing the criteria costs HDB nothing and settles the question in a sentence.
WHAT YOU CAN DO BEFORE 1 SEPTEMBER
1. If you would like to attend, write to HDB before Tuesday 25 August. Ask to be included, or placed on a waitlist. Mention that you submitted official feedback — you have already done the work this session exists to discuss.Write to HDB ("Category of Feedback", choose "Land Use Plans")
2. In the same email, ask for four things:
— The selection criteria for invitations, published.
— A livestream, or a second session, so those who cannot fit in the room can still hear what is said in it.
— The response report the Government committed to publishing, summarising agencies' replies to feedback and the amendments made — before the session, so the room can discuss it rather than await it.
— Answers to what Parliament asked on 4 August and did not receive.
3. If you have an invitation, come with one specific question. Be precise, because general opposition is easy to answer and specific requests are harder to leave on the table:
— The avoidance criteria and minimum viable habitat thresholds used to decide which parcels are kept.
— What a "major negative" biodiversity rating actually triggers in the process.
— The demand and household formation projections behind the yield, and how forecasts have compared with actual take-up over ten years.
— Site-specific urban heat modelling.
— The new retention figures, and the baselines they are measured against, so "more greenery" can be seen rather than felt.
— Monitoring commitments for the forest that remains.
4. Tell one neighbour who has not seen the email. Half of this campaign has run on people forwarding things to people.
A dialogue held by invitation, for two sites at once, in a room of two hundred, can still be a real dialogue. Openness is the part that decides which. Six weeks ago the plan was described as the outcome of careful study; on 14 August it was described as never having been final. That change happened because ordinary people kept asking in the proper channels, politely, with the receipts.
So let us keep asking. One week, one email.
For the forest,
The Save Maju Forest petition
IG: @savemajuforest