Dear Editor,
I saw on Saturday that Minister Whittaker was trying to disparage the Linden Town Council for non-submission of the budget for 2014. This is unfortunate because despite the quality of personnel handed to the council by the ministry the council is more than capable of producing proper budgets.
The council’s administration has also been assisted by a concerned citizen but we made it clear that we are not going to accommodate the charade because you cannot chop in one fell swoop over 36% of the council’s revenue and expect that it will produce a budget of substance. So, I make it pellucidly clear that the budget crafted (just read) with the help provided will not achieve 50% of its mandate. The ministry is also habitual in instructing from Georgetown so what is the Minister lamenting about. My council can produce a budget in 24 hours. That is ‘joke business’ but the officers who have to execute it must understand the process and work closely with it, failing which the budget will be seen as one emanating from the council and they are not in tune with its activation.
It is claimed that some officers did not help. Do you want to jeopardize their existence and expect them to be gleeful about getting things done? Minister also forgot that the Treasurer was fired in September 2013 and it took some time before an acting Treasurer was put in place in October 2013. I called the young man to a meeting and expressed the need to focus on his budget for 2014. The first thing he has to do is get the income and expenditure reports updated to September 2013 and I will work in establishing his cash book. The clerk dealing with expenditure was summoned but the clerk dealing with compiling revenue was on leave. The decision was to get her out to complete this assignment for a day and the rest will be done. She was not contacted and no one pursued the issue.
Councillors have a right to reject the actions of the Minister and refuse to participate in the façade. A few hours ago a summary of the budget for 2014 was given to me, that I will pass to the Finance Chairman for her to circulate and then call a meeting soonest. It is the first time anything came to us. So his comment about rejection of the budget by councillors is erroneous, facetious and meant to discredit. The comment of interest in the toll booth is disrespectful because my councillors do not collect any money for the council. That is the administration’s work. All collections are done by workers and not councillors. We have been civil and upfront with this Minister, but his insinuation is clear that this deranged management culture is ubiquitous in the corridors of power.
The Minister is a victim of his own machinations and so cannot now complain as the person chosen to execute the government’s programme of havoc. If the government was serious by now it would have made a clear statement on the shortfall of the budget of 2013 which was created by his decision. But more fundamentally they have been pointing to the amount of money owed by residents.
That process I have pointed out ad nauseam will not result in major changes in the fortunes of the municipality because of the protracted nature of the legal system. My fear is also that politics will be played with the issue and the matters will lag interminably. In most instances you are not going
to recoup the amounts outstanding because of the derelict nature of the premises.
What I want is for the Minister to answer to the nation and many persons would have seen me raising this matter without fully understanding what I am talking about. For the past five years we have been plugging the increase of properties to be included on our tax roll. It was resisted for years. Anna Regina and Linden were the two municipalities that were bold enough to increase taxes but these were rejected since 2006. Linden then decided to move to include the missing properties on the roll by hiring a private valuer. We were written and told that it was not possible to use the route we chose. Undeterred, our efforts were not successful for all sorts of reasons until 2013 when to his credit Minister Whittaker was able to get the process going. The valuation officers have been operating for the past six months and have produced less than 300 properties for the roll. The men were travelling to Linden daily to do the valuations. The council had arranged accommodation, meals and transportation along with supporting staff. This was rejected by the Ministry of Finance for daily travels. By the time they got to Linden with the traffic woes on the East Bank it was time to head back to base. The bombshell was that the new properties worth ten times the value of those constructed 40-50 years ago were valued lower. How was this possible? We found out that the men were valuing at the 1976 and not even the 2006 level on which government had rebased its GDP. I wondered and came up with the position that we are all victims of the government’s devious devices. High rises are mainly in Georgetown, but other new buildings are found all over Guyana and these will attract huge taxes if valued at current day prices.
This will be too much money in the hands of the councils of Georgetown, Linden and other local organs, including those controlled by the PPP. The independence these organs will now have to execute their programmes would mean they have less dependence on the central ministry. No one will have to go cap in hand begging. We must reject this perniciousness and ensure that local organs have the level of independence to survive rather than depend on hand outs from the
‘good boys.’
I await the Minister’s response because I have a mouthful to say, but my councillors would want me to stick to the case at hand.
Yours faithfully,
Orrin Gordon
