By Jeff Trotman
Chairman of the Linden IMC, Orrin Gordon, says the entity is operating without a budget and this is causing serious financial stress and anxiety. He made the disclosure on Friday 2 January 2015 during a press briefing to update local journalists on the challenges the Linden Town Council faced in 2014 and some of the plans the local government body has for the town in 2015.
Gordon said the Linden IMC submitted its annual budget for 2015 in mid-November 2014, in accordance with the law but up to Friday 2 January 2015, the IMC had not received a response from the Ministry of Local Government on the budget. He said some revenue earning systems, including an increase of ten or eleven per cent in rates and taxes across the board, were put in the budget and were expected to be implemented from the beginning of 2015 but without a response from the Local Government Ministry this measure could not have been implemented.
Despite this constraint, Gordon said, the Linden Town Council was able to put some revenue earning systems in place. In highlighting his disappointment with the fiscal constraints being placed on the Linden IMC by the government, the Linden IMC Chairman stated that the Council received responses in other areas, causing much concern within the municipality because the Council felt those areas were not the remit of the Local Government Ministry.
Formula
He said that there is a formula that is used to determine the amount of the money the respective local government bodies receive from the government. Explaining that the amount of money received by the respective municipalities is based on the population size of the municipalities and the amount of rates and taxes the municipality collects, the Linden IMC Chairman said, “We waited about six, seven years for this thing to come up and when it came up all we got basically was about $2 million more than the $10 million we would have [normally] received. So, that says very clearly to us that this fiscal transfer that has been touted is nothing to talk about, and basically, therefore, I am appalled that Linden got only $2 million when we are top of the line – we were able to receive about 70% of our rates and taxes for the year.”
Coordination
Gordon said the $11 million to $12 million that the Linden municipality receives from government annually cannot cover all the services it would like to provide, consequently, a lot of the infrastructural work within the town such as road repairs is done by the government and the Regional Democratic Council while the Town Council does “a little patch work here and there.” In this regard, he said, there is need for better communication between the Linden municipality and the Region Ten Democratic Council since “the coordination between the two is very, very poor.”
Stating that projects are undertaken in the town without the town council being officially informed about them, Gordon said the town council only becomes aware of a lot of these projects when residents complain to the Town Council that they are negatively affected. “For example, a culvert is going across Republic Avenue and nobody knows until you go there and you see the stoppage of traffic then you wonder what’s going on and then you get somebody and they say that a culvert is being put in there – and the same thing would have happened before. We’ve had situations where work is being done … even on Sir David Rose Avenue, a very important artery and we are not told what is happening. The police also are not told what is happening and then the police would come and ask us what’s going on and we are left like we don’t know what’s going on within the town.”
He said in former times there was better coordination between the RDC and the Town Council because the RDC would request information from the Town Council about its projects for the new year, which the RDC would include in its budget for the next year and the RDC would subsequently inform the Town Council of the projects that were approved.
Gordon said in the current situation, the Council would attempt to do some patchwork in a particular area only to come to the realization that the RDC is attempting to do the same patchwork in the same area.
Stressing that the Council will not utilize its scarce financial resource where money is being spent by the other local government organ, Gordon reiterated the need for better cooperation.
He said that personality differences “need to be sorted out because we can’t continue to operate like that because residents of the community are going to suffer and we need to maximize every single resource that we have. This money is not Gordon’s money or the Town Clerk’s money, or anybody from the regional administration’s money. This money is the citizens’ money and the citizens are paramount in this process and, therefore, we have a responsibility to ensure that we do this on behalf of the citizens in a manner that the citizens would feel comfortable and pleased with what we are doing.”
Oversight
Gordon said that a lot of the work is done in a very shoddy way and because the work is shoddily done, those involved in the exercise are reluctant to talk about it. “At least, if you let the municipality know, we would make a special effort to monitor what’s going on …. Like I said in times past it wasn’t like that. We had a better organized system. We knew where the work was being done. We got the scope of works for all the works that were done in Linden and that was important to us. There was an insistence that those documents from the administration come to our administration.
“Our administration has been writing the regional administration, asking them for documents, asking them for scope of works and we are not getting them and this is very, very poor on the part of the two local organs cooperating and coordinating on behalf of the citizens of this community. I want to make that clear and say that straight up. I have no fear of contradiction.”
He, however, pointed to other areas such as environmental health in which the two local government entities have better coordination. “We combine our resources and do fogging exercises together. That is commendable and I would like to commend the persons, who are operating in that regard.”
