President Bharrat Jagdeo has asked the Co-Chair of the Joint Task Force on Local Government Reform, Clinton Collymore to reconvene its meetings on a sustained basis to separate issues that have been agreed on.
Asked at a media briefing on Wednesday about his decision on Collymore’s position that the task force was “deadlocked” and the PNCR’s position that it was not, Jagdeo said that he has informed PNCR Leader Robert Corbin that he has asked Collymore to reconvene the task force since the PNCR has indicated that there was no deadlock.
Corbin had written a letter to the President outlining his party’s position on the matter, contending that Collymore had unilaterally declared the deadlock.
The President said that the members of the task force are to re-engage in a sustained fashion over a number of days as there “is urgency in this matter as the Leader of the Opposition seems to think.”
Hopefully, he said, “the members would not be averse to meeting continuously over several days to isolate those issues that we have agreement on and those that we don’t have agreement on.”
Those issues on which they do not agree could be dealt with in an engagement between Corbin and himself, he said, but he would prefer that they are dealt with in a sub-committee of parliament.
Prior to the August parliamentary recess, Co-Chair Vincent Alexander was optimistic that the draft pieces of legislation, critical to the holding of long overdue local government elections, on which the task force was working could have been completed by the end of the year and made ready for parliamentary approval.
He had told Stabroek News earlier that the objective was to complete all the necessary reforms by the third quarter of this year, which has already passed.
