– puts Heads of Department through exhaustive budget deliberations

If Keith Burrowes insists that his work as Chairman of the 2008 Commission of Enquiry into the operations of the Georgetown Mayor and City Council is done he makes no secret of his intimate involvement in supporting the implementation of a menu of measures which he hopes will extricate the municipality from its present predicament.

Burrowes and his Implementation Committee are seeking holistic solutions to the myriad problems of the City Council articulated in the recommendations contained in the report. There is, however, no mistaking the fact that the high-powered public officer who also heads the Health Sector Development Unit has taken unerring aim at the deficiencies that inhere in the municipality’s financial management systems.

What appears to be Burrowes’ priority pursuit is his quest to help City Hall remedy its crisis and is hardly surprising. The findings of his report chronicle a litany of weaknesses in the financial management systems at City Hall including vulnerable computer systems, downright incompetence among key managers, disregard for and blatant flouting of financial regulations which, taken together, combined to produce fraud in some cases.

Last week, Burrowes continued to put City Hall’s Heads of Department through the altogether unaccustomed pace of painstakingly deliberating the municipality’s budget estimates. In previous years, the municipality’s deliberations on budgetary issues had been underpinned by a practice that has customarily projected estimated expenditure around anticipated revenue and since most of the municipality’s revenue accrues from a woefully inefficient rates and taxes revenue collection regimen, its customary tendency of attaching expenditure to the anticipated garnering of revenue has been the bane of its existence. An interesting and radical departure from previous practice is the decision to make the approved budget available to the public, a move which Burrowes had told this newspaper in a previous interview was designed to render City Hall more accountable to the public.

In the report of the Commission of Enquiry, Burrowes made no secret of the fact that much

of the municipality’s operational problems were due to the “high levels of inefficiency among staff, often, at the highest levels of the municipality’s public service and notably among many of those responsible for critical areas of the council’s financial management regimen”. And while Burrowes said that the upgrading City Hall’s human resource base cannot be a short-term goal, he appears determined that the current staff weaknesses will not halt the reform bandwagon. Apart from his inclusion of City Hall outsiders on his Implementation Committee, Burrowes has moved to infuse the staff of City Hall with a new management culture. In a recent article written by Burrowes and published in another section of the media he cited:

(1) ad hoc decision-making as a result of  poor planning

(2) ensuring a linkage between budget activities and specific indicators and

(3) ensuring that monitoring mechanisms are in place.

These measures, Burrowes said, make for “a results-based system of operations” the likes of which, the Burrowes Report indicates was clearly absent at City Hall and which is non-existent at quite a few other national institutions.

Burrowes said he believes that “a critical aspect of any decision-making mechanism is that of sanction and individual responsibility.” He believes that there has to be a direct way of linking the performances of individuals to objectives in the absence of which what materializes is exactly the situation that materialized at City Hall, a circumstance in which no one is directly responsible.

As a precursor to raising standards of professionalism and levels of accountability within the framework of the administration and management of City Hall’s financial regime, the Implementation Commit-tee which Burrowes heads is seeking to restructure the City Treasury.
This will include the eventual replacement of the dismissed City Treasurer as well as the institution of a new IT system to replace the one so heavily discredited in the findings of the report.