Part 66
Introduction
Mr. David Patterson, Minister of Public Infrastructure, offered a commendably prompt but strange response to last week’s column by way of his December 8 letter to the editor “The 2019 budgetary allocation has nothing to do with natural gas”. Strange because Mr. Patterson appears to have set out to contradict the statement in Column 65 that it was unclear how an ocean floor mapping exercised announced by him will cost and where it is provided for in the 2019 Budget. Having agreed that there is no budgetary allocation, in compliance with the Constitution, there can be no such activity in 2019.
But Mr. Patterson adds further confusion to the matter by seeking to deny that he spoke with Stabroek News regarding statements on any ocean floor mapping exercise, provoking a direct response from the editor of the Stabroek News that one of its reporters did in fact speak to Minister Patterson for the purposes of the article. It is surely very troubling that Mr. Patterson, a senior Minister, can be so careless and forgetful that he cannot recall a matter as significant as this.